Spillover effects of interactions on user innovation: Evidence from a firm-hosted open innovation platform

Abstract

Firm-hosted open innovation platforms (OIPs) enable multidirectional communication and interaction among users, and they have become a vital IT artifact that absorbs external resources for enterprise innovation. A key challenge for OIPs is how to motivate users’ idea contributions. The support community appears as a Q&A section in a few OIPs, in which the special role of user behavior on individuals’ idea contribution is understudied. Based on a theoretical synthesis of innovation management studies, we propose hypotheses regarding the spillover effects of user interactions in a support community (i.e., help giving and help seeking) on individuals’ innovation performance (i.e., the quantity and quality of ideas). Using a dataset from a typical OIP, we employ two empirical studies to investigate the spillover effects of user interactions and their characteristics, including breadth and depth, on innovation performance. Our results confirm the existence of spillover effects and reveal a positive effect of interaction breadth and a nonlinear effect of interaction depth on innovation. Notably, the nonlinear relationship can be moderated by the interaction breadth. Our findings provide both theoretical and practical implications for user innovation and OIP operations.