Collaboration and the Quality of User Generated Ideas in Online Innovation Communities

Enabled by Internet-based technologies, users are increasingly participating and collaborating in idea generation in online innovation communities. Beyond increasing the quantity of ideas contributed by users, firms are looking to obtain innovation ideas of better quality. However, with the limited understanding of the phenomenon, few studies have focused on investigating what determines the quality of collaboratively generated user ideas in online innovation communities. This study aims to address this knowledge gap by investigating the antecedents of the quality of user generated ideas from a knowledge collaboration perspective. Based on this perspective, we propose that idea creation effort, peer co-production, and peer feedback will directly and interactively influence the quality of user generated ideas. The model was tested with archival data from the SAPien’s innovation community as well as idea quality rating data from experts. The results reveal that idea creation effort and peer feedback affect the quality of user generated idea. Further, idea creation effort negatively moderates the relationship between peer co-production and the quality of user generated ideas.