User Roles and Contributions in User Innovation Community

Abstract

User innovation community is an important source for enterprises to obtain originality and relevant product information. In user innovation communities, users are the creators and participators of content and also the providers of wisdom. Classifying the type of users would help people play a more positive role in the open knowledge communities, and improve the innovation, sharing of knowledge and generation of wisdom more preferably. In order to help enterprises to successfully manage the community’s users, HUAWEI cellphone community is taken as an example to explore different contributions of online users with district behavior characteristics. The user samples are classified by these four indicators to build a matrix classification model of users such as creation number, knowledge degree, in-degree centrality and out-degree centrality with K-means clustering. And it further draws six different types of user roles, including core users, active contributors, passive contributors, social users, information acquiring users and divers. It also provides management strategies for enterprises to classify and manage different types of users when operating user innovation communities.