A Comparison of Creative Behaviours in Online Communities across Cultures

Research on the formation mechanism of product contribution in online product communities: content contribution as a mediating variable

Purpose

Enterprises build online product community to expect users to contribute: opinion sharing (content contribution) and product consumption (product contribution). Previous literature rarely focused on both. The purpose of this paper is to explain user contribution mechanism by identifying content contribution and product contribution.

Design/methodology/approach

This research chose Xiaomi-hosted online product community (bbs.xiaomi.cn) and Huawei-hosted online product community (club.huawei.com) where users can freely share ideas and buy products at the same time. Data were crawled from 109,665 community users to construct dependent variable measurement, and 611 questionnaires were used to verify research hypotheses.

Findings

The results indicate that both cognitive needs and personal integration needs have a significant positive impact on browse behavior; social integration needs and hedonic needs have a significant positive impact on content contribution behavior. Browse behavior not only directly affects but also indirectly influences product contribution through content contribution behavior.

Research limitations/implications

Findings of this research provide community managers with useful insights into the relationship between content contribution and product contribution.

Originality/value

This study explains the formation mechanism of user product contribution and reveals the relationship between user content contribution and product contribution in online product community. This paper provides a different way of theorizing user contributions by incorporating uses and gratifications theory into the “Motivation-Behavior-Result” framework.

USER MOTIVATION AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN IDEA CROWDSOURCING

We investigate how the propensity to trust, intrinsic motivation, and extrinsic motivation drive the intentions of individuals to share knowledge in idea crowdsourcing. Building on motivation theories and Uses & Gratifications (U&G) approach, we conducted a web-based survey within IdeasProject, an open innovation and brainstorming community dedicated to harvesting ideas. Based on a sample of 244 users, our research shows that the key driver of knowledge-sharing intentions is made up of two intrinsic motivations — social benefits and learning benefits. We also found that recognition from the host company affects intention to share knowledge. From the management point of view, the relative importance of social integrative benefits calls for better facilities available for users to be able to help each other in formulating and developing their ideas. Learning and creativity could be inspired by feedback from professionals and experts, while providing insight into technological advances and features dealing with the current tasks.

(Re)Locating boundaries: a systematic review of online ethnography

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to systematically review online ethnography and its boundary challenges. The paper especially focusses on how researchers draw space boundaries, set time boundaries and engage their online field.

Design/methodology/approach

– The authors perform a systematic review of extant literature and identify 59 papers in 40 different journals as online ethnographies from various management disciplines. The authors perform both qualitative and quantitative analyses on papers in the sample.

Findings

– The paper identifies how online ethnographers both define boundaries and engage their online field. The paper shows that some of the advantages of online ethnography actually prompt researchers to favor-specific research designs over others.

Research limitations/implications

– The authors only focussed on articles adopting online ethnography in organization and management studies that are listed in Social Sciences Citation Index database. Online ethnographies in other research fields and indexes are not studied in this paper.

Practical implications

– The paper makes suggestions on how to complement existing online ethnographies to reach a more comprehensive practice of online ethnography.

Social implications

– The systematic review may help researchers to locate useful online ethnography examples across various management disciplines and may contribute to the maturation of online ethnography.

Originality/value

– The paper synthesizes emerging trends in online ethnography and identifies how specific advantages actually prompt online ethnographers to limit themselves in their research designs.