用户中心型互动对企业创新的影响——基于HarmonyOS在线社区的案例研究

Impacts of user-centered interactions on a firm′s innovation performance: A case study of HarmonyOS online community

用户为王时代,企业与用户共创价值成为赢取竞争优势的战略选择,而互动是共创核心。然而,面对在线社区中多样性主体间广泛互动,什么样的互动以及企业如何治理用户互动才能有效实现共创目标仍是个待解问题。基于价值共创理论,以鸿蒙系统开发过程为例,利用Python抓取在线社区主体信息及其行为数据,在识别以用户为中心的互动类型基础上构建了用户中心型互动的测量方法,据此探索并检验了在线社区中用户中心型互动影响企业创新的机理。发现:用户中心型互动对企业创新的影响并非简单的“共创”还是“共毁”的判断,而是呈现出时序性双元特征,即:普通(大众)用户之间互动显著提升面向未来产品开发的根本性创新绩效,但不利于当前已上市新产品的渐进性创新绩效提升。并且,普通用户与企业及其代理人之间互动并不利于企业创新绩效的提升,包括渐进性与根本性创新绩效;用户互动贡献企业创新过程中需要更高的社区自治,而用户与企业及其代理人之间互动的效应则更需要企业引导。从价值创造全过程视角厘清了企业基于在线社区利用用户中心型互动获益的基本框架,识别了企业对在线社区中不同互动的治理策略,为互联网与数字技术广泛应用下的企业与用户共创实践提供了理论指导。

The era characterized as time-based competition and turbulent environment has come,which makes a firm be aware of the strategic importance of co-creating value with users.And interaction has been recognized as the core of value co-creation.However,the questions of what kinds of interactions will contribute to a firm′s innovation,and how a firm guides those interactions to facilitate the goal of value co-creation to be realized needs to be clarified,since a mass of interactions occurs in the firm hosted online community.The present study aims to answer the questions mentioned above by means of research design integrating quality and quantity methods based on the theory of value co-creation.Using the dataset of multi-actor′s behaviors′traces crawled from HarmonyOS′s user online community from September 3,2021 to February 27,2022,this present study firstly explored the measurements of user-centered interactions after the types of user-centered interactions have been identified.Then,the impacts of user-centered interactions on firm′s innovation performance with firm′s managerial behaviors in online community as moderators have been explored.Some findings were drawn as follows:(1)The impacts of user-centered interactions on a firm′s innovations show the characteristics of sequential ambidexterity,rather than the simply judgment of co-creation or co-destruction.Specifically,interaction between mass users benefits a firm′s radical innovation performance,while reducing the firm′s incremental innovation performance.And the interactions between mass users and the firm and those between mass users and the firm′s agents,namely,expert users,will reduce the firm′s innovation performance including radical and incremental innovation performances.(2)While the contribution of mass users to a firm′s innovation performance needs higher level of user self-governance,the interaction between mass users and the firm needs higher level of firm′s instruction.From the holistic perspective of whole process of value co-creation,our findings will contribute to the theory of value co-creation by identifying which kind of user-centered interactions and how a firm′s governance mechanisms designed to instruct those interactions to benefit a firm′s value co-production.The findings will be helpful for firms to make good uses of user-centered interactions occurring in online community in practice,especially in the era of digitalization.Finally,the theoretical contributions,managerial implications and limitations have also been discussed in this paper.