My idea is our idea! Supporting user-driven innovation activities in crowdsourcing communities

Abstract

There is a growing stream of research unraveling individual motivations to participate in idea crowdsourcing and online user communities. While the current research has largely focused on individual user characteristics and overlooked the features of surrounding communities, our research turns the focus onto the actual community where knowledge is shared and created. We investigate the relationships between perceived support from a crowdsourcing community, and the users' intentions to share knowledge. Our research is based on a survey of 241 Chinese users of IdeasProject and shows that (1) for community trust, trust in the hosting firm has a significant effect on knowledge-sharing intentions, while collaborative norms do not; (2) for community support, both technology-based support and knowledge-based support have an effect on knowledge-sharing intentions. From a community management viewpoint, our results demonstrate the importance of providing continued support for knowledge integration, such as more opportunities for user-to-user interaction and features for providing constructive feedback.