Value co-creation in online collaborative innovation communities: exploring the drivers and outcomes of value co-creation activities from the individual community member point of view

Abstract

Online collaborative innovation communities are interactive platforms in which independent actors co-create value through resource integration. Despite fruitful research on collaborative innovation with customers, current understanding regarding how value is co-created in online platforms from an individual actor perspective remains limited. It remains unclear what drives individual actors to perform value co-creation activities and what value dimensions they derive as a result of the collaboration experience. Moreover, there is scarcity of knowledge regarding what activities independent actors perform in value co-creation. Only a handful of studies provide typologies of value co-creation activities, and none of these examine co-creation in an online collaborative innovation community context. This thesis aims to advance existing knowledge on drivers and outcomes of value co-creation activities, namely information sharing, providing feedback, helping, and rapport building, from the perspective of an individual member of a collaborative innovation community. To best capture the drivers of value co-creation activities, a comprehensive set of individual and social factors were employed in this research. Social factors included social interaction opportunities available in the collaboration community and social capital dimensions, namely trust, shared vision, and centrality. Individual factors were captured by applying the motivation, opportunity, and ability framework in the collaborative innovation context. Moreover, value dimensions, namely social, emotional, utilitarian and value for effort, were examined as outcome factors from the individual community member point of view. Literature on value co-creation was reviewed to uncover potential moderators and mediators of relationships between social and individual factors and value co-creation activities. Accordingly, learning activity was examined as a mediator between social and individual factors and value co-creation activities, while a flow state was analysed as a potential moderator of relationships between social and individual factors and learning and value co-creation activities, respectively. This research comprised an explanatory quantitative study. A self-administered online questionnaire was used to collect data from collaborative innovation community members yielding a total of 309 complete responses. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse data, employing variance-based SEM with partial least squares (PLS) path modelling in SmartPLS due to the nature of the study and concerns regarding heteroscedasticity and abnormality of the data. This research makes an important contribution to theory by confirming that independent individuals engage in different value co-creation activities for different social and individual reasons. Results indicated that information sharing is driven by community member centrality and leads to social and utilitarian value. Providing feedback, on the other hand, is driven by social interaction opportunities and individual motivation which generates emotional, utilitarian values, and value for effort. Similarly, helping is an activity driven by social interactions and motivation which leads to utilitarian value. Finally, rapport building is a value co-creation activity performed when community members perceive social interaction opportunities, centrality, have trust in other members, and are motivated. Performing rapport building in the collaborative innovation community generates social, emotional, utilitarian values, and value for effort. Furthermore, the important facilitator role of learning in co-creation of value experience was demonstrated. However, the proposed moderating effect of flow state was not confirmed. Finally, this research provided additional support of current knowledge on the determination and perception of value by demonstrating that different dimensions of value are uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the community members as main resource integrators who perform value co-creation activities in an online collaboration setting. This research also informs collaborative innovation community management about how to facilitate and understand factors that drive community members to perform value co-creation activities and how to contribute to co-creation of different value dimensions. Further research should continue to endeavour to establish a better understanding of how individual actors are engaged in value co-creation activities.