领先用户的创意对其识别创业机会的影响研究

Research on the impact of leading users′ ideas on their identification of entrepreneurship opportunities

领先用户因具备领先市场趋势与高期望收益特征,最可能发展成为创业者。然而从实践来看,真正转化为创业者的领先用户仍然凤毛麟角,究其原因在于领先用户的创意向创业机会转化的过程并不顺畅,目前这一过程机理尚未得到深入揭示。以华为产品定义社区内181位领先用户为研究对象,通过实证分析检验领先用户的创意与创业机会识别的关系,以及领先用户参与在线创新社区程度在其中发挥的调节作用。结果显示:领先用户的创意数量与创业机会识别呈现倒U型关系,参与社区的广度和深度强化了上述关系。领先用户的创意质量积极促进其识别创业机会,参与社区的广度弱化了上述关系。研究结论丰富了用户创业的相关研究,揭示了领先用户创意的理论价值,有助于指导领先用户更好地开展创业实践。

With the rise of digital technology, users have gradually transformed from passive recipients of products or services to product providers. According to this background, leading users are most likely to become entrepreneurs due to the characteristics of leading market trends and high expected returns. Furthermore, entrepreneurial activities carried out by leading users are of great significance to release social entrepreneurship and promote the implementation of innovation-driven development strategy. However, in practice, there are still few leading users who successfully convert into entrepreneurs. The reason is that the ideas generated by the leading users have not been effectively converted into entrepreneurial opportunities. Therefore, it is of great theoretical significance and practical value to explore how the ideas of leading users affects their identification of entrepreneurial opportunities.Based on the reality of user entrepreneurship under digital technology, this paper constructed a relationship model of leading user ideas, user entrepreneurial opportunity identification and participation in online innovation community. Using the sample data of 181 leading users in the Huawei product definition community, the hierarchical regression analysis is used to explore the mechanism of leading users' ideas affecting entrepreneurial opportunity identification, and reveal the moderating effect of the degree of leading users' participation in the community on the leading users' ideas and entrepreneurial opportunity identification. Based on theoretical and empirical research, the results show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the number of ideas of leading users and entrepreneurial opportunity identification, and the breadth and depth of community participation strengthen the relationship. The quality of ideas of leading users actively promotes their identification of entrepreneurial opportunities, while the breadth of community participation weakens this relationship.The theoretical contributions of this paper are as follows. Firstly, existing studies tend to focus on the key influencing factors of leading users' creativity, while the results of ideas generation are still insufficient. Based on the active contribution behavior of leading users, this paper reveals the influence of leading users' ideas on entrepreneurial opportunities, and expands the research on the internal mechanism of leading users' entrepreneurship from the perspective of creativity. Secondly, this paper reveals the internal mechanism of the transformation from leading users to entrepreneurs, which makes up for the limitations of existing studies that focus solely on user innovation and user entrepreneurship, and provides a new research perspective for the research on innovation-driven entrepreneurship. Further, this study introduced the strength of social network relationship into the field of user entrepreneurship, providing a new theoretical explanation for the research on the relationship between user innovation and user entrepreneurship, and promoting the development of the theory of innovation-driven entrepreneurship. Finally, although previous studies have realized the role of online innovation community in the process of user entrepreneurship, they have not revealed how it plays a specific role in the process of user innovation to user entrepreneurship. This paper defines the role of "regulator" of online innovation community, reveals the situational role of online innovation community in the relationship between user ideas and entrepreneurial opportunity identification, and enriches the research literature on the interaction process of leading users in online innovation community.