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Lead user analyses for the development of new industrial products
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Knowledge sharing in virtual communities – a review of the empirical research
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Journal of Management Information Systems
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Discursive construction of 'user innovations' in the open source software development context
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Knowledge Collaboration in Online Communities
Organization Science
Task Design, Motivation, and Participation in Crowdsourcing Contests
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
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Organization Science
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How to (crowd-)fund and manage the (user-)innovation: the case of Big Buck Bunny
Proceedings of the Workshop on Open Source and Design of Communication
DIY-CDR: an ontology-based, Do-It-Yourself component discoverer and recommender
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing
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Organization Science
The Core and Cosmopolitans: A Relational View of Innovation in User Communities
Organization Science
DPPI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces
How does social software change knowledge management? Toward a strategic research agenda
The Journal of Strategic Information Systems
"What's coming next?" Epistemic curiosity and lurking behavior in online communities
Computers in Human Behavior
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Managing virtual communities of practice to drive product innovation
International Journal of Web Based Communities
Theory and Analysis of Company-Sponsored Value Co-Creation
Journal of Management Information Systems
Involving users in the wild-Participatory product development in and with online communities
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
How user communities improve mass customization productivity
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Communities and Technologies
Online idea contests: identifying factors for user retention
OCSC'13 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Online Communities and Social Computing
The Journal of Strategic Information Systems
Challenges of implementing innovation contests to facilitate radical innovation
International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations
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Studies of the sources of innovations have recognized that many innovations are developed by users. However, the fact that firms employ communities of users to strengthen their innovation process has not yet received much attention. In online firm-hosted user communities, users freely reveal innovations to a firm's product platform, which can put the firm in a favorable position (a) because these new product features become available to all users through sharing on a user-to-user basis, or (b) because it allows the firm to pick up the innovations and integrate them in future products and then benefit by selling them to all users. We study the key personal attributes of the individuals responsible for innovations, namely the innovative users, to explain creation of value in this organizational context. The main question is why such users contribute to firm-hosted user communities. Analyzing data derived from multiple sources (interviews, a Web-log, and questionnaires), we find that innovative users are likely to be (i) hobbyists, an attribute that can be assumed to (positively) affect innovators' willingness to share innovations, and (ii) responsive to firm recognition as a motivating factor for undertaking innovation, which explains their decision to join the firm's domain. In agreement with earlier studies, we also find that innovative users are likely to be lead users, an attribute that we assume to affect the quality of user innovation. Whether or not a firm-hosted user community can be turned into an asset for the firm is to a great extent conditional on the issues studied in this paper.