Diffusion to peers in firm-hosted user innovation communities: Contributions by professional versus amateur users

Abstract

Users can develop innovations that improve or complement a firm’s product. To benefit from these, firms may host online user innovation communities (UICs) with two purposes: 1. Incorporate user innovations into the firm’s products, and 2. Facilitate the direct diffusion of user innovations to peer users to increase the product’s general value. The second of these objectives (antecedents of peer diffusion) is under-investigated. Peer diffusion comes with additional challenges: when the hosting firm’s innovation experts (e.g., R&D workers) do not pick up the role of continued development, adoption by peers is frustrated—as many user innovators lack the expertise to improve their initial prototypes so that peers can easily adopt. We address this gap by exploring if contributions by professional external users of the hosting firm’s product have better peer diffusion rates compared to those of amateur users. We argue that professionals’ expertise in design and marketing enables them to improve their initial prototypes, which peers can adopt more easily. Next, taking an interactionist perspective, we hypothesize that the relationship between professional user status and peer diffusion is amplified by users’ commercial motivation and their central position in the UIC’s network. We analyze multiple-source data of 614 innovations contributed by 122 users of a firm-hosted UIC in 3D printing. We find that contributions by professionals indeed diffuse better, but only at high commercial motivation or favorable network positions (high closeness centrality). To firm-hosted UICs, professional users are an important asset advancing the free peer diffusion of user innovations without firm interventions and merit attention when designing UICs.