Where are your ideas going? Idea adoption in online user innovation communities

Abstract

PurposeWith the proliferation of ideas submitted by users in firm-built online user innovation communities, community managers are faced with the problem of user idea overload. The purpose of this paper is to explore the influencing factors on the idea adoption to identify high quality ideas, and then propose a method to quickly filter high value ideas.Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected more than 110,000 data submitted by Xiaomi community users and analyzed the factors affecting idea adoption using a multinomial logistic regression model. In addition, the authors also used BP neural network to predict the idea adoption process.FindingsThe empirical results show that idea semantics, number of likes, number of comments, number of related posts, the existence of pictures and self-presentation have positive impact on idea adoption, while idea length and idea timeliness had negative impact on idea adoption. In addition, this paper calculates the idea evaluation value through the idea adoption process predicted by neural network and the mean value of idea term frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF).Originality/valueThis empirical study expands the theoretical perspective of idea adoption research by using dual-process theory and enriches the research methods in the field of idea adoption research through the multinomial logistic regression method. Based on our findings, firms can quickly identify valuable ideas and effectively alleviate the information overload problem of online user innovation communities.