Factors Influencing User-Idea Selection in Open Innovation Communities

ABSTRACT It is becoming an important innovation strategy for firms to gather the user-idea extensively through open innovation communities (OICs). However, screening out valuable ideas from massive user ideas in an OIC is a huge challenge for the firm. It is very important to identify the relevant factors that influence user-idea selection. Drawing upon persuasion theory, we develop a conceptual model integrating idea quality characteristics, idea contributor characteristics, and idea emotion characteristics to explain the likelihood of idea selection, using 23,165 user ideas in the MIUI Community hosted by Xiaomi, a Chinese mobile phone manufacturer ranked among the Fortune Global 500. The empirical results show that these characteristics variables have significant impacts on user-idea selection. Specifically, the length of the idea and title has an inverted U-shaped relationship with idea selection. The emotions contained in user ideas have a significant positive impact on idea selection, and user attention negatively moderates the relationship between emotion and idea selection. This study contributes to the user co-creation literature by offering a persuasion perspective to explain user-idea selection in OICs. It also offers novel insights for building reasonable rules in OICs to guide user behavior for managers.