The Impact of User Benefits on Continuous Contribution Behavior Based on the Perspective of Stimulus–Organism–Response Theory

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet, enterprises have integrated internal and external innovation resources through the establishment of open innovation communities, guided users to participate in innovation activities, and promoted product improvement and development. Users’ continuous contribution behavior is a key factor for open innovation communities to achieve sustainable development, yet most communities do not collect enough data on them. This study investigates the mechanism of user benefits on continuous contribution behavior in open innovation communities based on the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S-O-R) theory, which creatively takes self-verification as a member of the organism (O). This was chosen to overcome the aforementioned issues. Based on the questionnaire data of 469 users in open innovation communities, the SEM method was applied to test the relationship between user benefits, self-verification, and continuous contribution behavior, and the moderating role of future work self-salience on self-verification. The empirical results show that user benefits positively affected both continuous contribution behavior and self-verification. Self-verification positively affected continuous contribution behavior and mediated the relationship between economic, functional, and self-fulfillment benefits and continuous contribution behavior. Meanwhile, future work self-salience positively moderated the relationship between these three types of benefits and self-verification. These findings provide a theoretical basis for the sustainable development of open innovation communities and guiding users to engage in continuous contribution behavior.