Focus on yourself: The impact of users' self-focus orientation on NPD ideas' attention allocation in online innovation communities

Abstract

When users write up and post their new product development (NPD) ideas online, they differ in their self-focus orientation—meaning the extent to which they choose to focus on themselves in their posts, such as whether they include personal pronouns like “I” and “me.” However, the impact of this linguistic style choice on the attention allocated by company employees to users' NPD ideas is unknown. This study examines the role of users' self-focus orientation in shaping the NPD ideas' attention allocation of company employees in the context of online innovation communities. Drawing upon motivated information processing theory, we develop a theoretical model positing that online users' self-focus orientation influences the NPD ideas' attention allocation of company employees and that the effect of users' self-focus orientation on NPD ideas' attention allocation is contingent on various online community characteristics, including online community crowdedness and online community interaction. Analyzing 647,224 NPD ideas collected from one online innovation community, we show that users' self-focus orientation has a positive effect on NPD ideas' attention allocation. We also find that the positive effect of users' self-focus orientation on NPD ideas' attention allocation is made weaker when community crowdedness is high and that it is made stronger when community interaction is high. These results reveal two important underlying, context-specific boundary conditions. The study also challenges the predominant view in the social psychology literature regarding the negative impact of self-focus. Overall, this research sheds new light on how and when users' self-focus orientation in online innovation communities affects employees' attention allocation to NPD ideas beyond the impact of the actual content of the posted ideas. Additionally, we discuss how users can attract the attention of company employees so that the employees will focus on their NPD ideas, and we offer suggestions to community managers to realize the full potential of their online innovation communities.