To share or not to share – Exploring the impact of sharing behaviour on user innovativeness

Abstract

We observe a rise of new business models that embed different forms of tangible product sharing. Innovation research and particularly user innovation research has hardly considered this topic. This paper sets out to conceptually and empirically explore the impact of users’ product sharing behaviour on users’ innovation behaviour. We contribute (i) a new concept labelled “sharing experience” and its operationalization based on the well-established use experience construct, (ii) a typology to categorize sharing types and (iii) a first empirical analysis quantifying the impact of sharing on user innovativeness. Primary data was collected from a large German farmer sharing community with 50+ years of sharing experience. The survey yielded 1,064 responses. Our results show that sharing has a significant positive impact on the user’s innovation behaviour. Users’ technical expertise positively moderates this relationship. The paper proposes four sharing types based on two dimensions of in- and out-sharing revealing significant differences across these types.