Innovation in Online Communities: Conditions for Customer Creativity and Contribution

Collaboration with and among customers is considered an important means of enhancing the effectiveness of innovation outcomes (Greer ad Lei, 2012; Gustafsson et al., 2012; Chan et al., 2010). Gambardella, Raascha and von Hippel (2017, p. 1450) acknowledge this emerging user innovation paradigm and attest that “extensive theoretical and empirical research has now led to an understanding that users are also a major source of innovation development”. Given this recognised perspective of customers as potential drivers of innovation, firms are now driven to understand how to harness the customers’ potential for this purpose. Taking a services marketing lens to this problem enables a service ecosystems (e.g. Vargo and Lusch 2016) or network perspective (e.g. Taatila et al., 2006) to understand how customers, in collaboration, result in more creative and effective innovation solutions. As such, we here focus specifically on the central role of customers within those systems or networks and seek to understand the conditions under which individual customer creativity and participation in co-creative innovation is enhanced.