查看文章

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 …