Coevolution of Networking and User Innovation in an Online Community

Abstract

Online user communities are increasingly important organizational structures and they can be the sources of competitive advantages and engines of collaborative innovation. Yet, only little is known about the dynamics of tie creation between community members in such communities and of how user innovation develops over time. This paper asks how social networking in online user communities evolve over time and how user innovation spreads through such communities. It also asks how user innovators behave in the communities compared with regular users. The analysis comprises three snapshots of a social network between 165 core community members over a two-year period, including their ties to peripheral community members outside the core. Both dynamic tie formation and adoption of user innovation behavior are analyzed, applying a dynamic stochastic actor-oriented modeling framework for social network analytics. This study finds that specific patterns of dynamic social networking precedes occurrences of user innovation in the community, and that user innovation in turn affects network evolution. These findings align with the theoretically understood but rarely empirically shown conception that social networks and innovation are endogenous to each-other, whereas previous research tends to infer the one while keeping the other constant.