How to Establish an Online Innovation Community? the Role of Users and Their Innovative Content

We studied the evolution of an online innovation community and users´ interaction behavior through social network analysis to explore how to build an innovation community and get a better understanding about the role of participating users and their innovative content. Throughout our analysis we explicitly recognize that the primary desired outcome of an online innovation community is the generation of innovation and breakthrough ideas and therefore simultaneously consider the user itself as well as the user generated ideas. Through relying on structural data combined with consideration of the context of our community we were able to identify eight different user types, who have different importance in supporting the health and success of the community.