In this study we shed light on the impact of cultural differences on creative processes and innovation creation in online communities. Analysing English-and Chinese-speaking online basketball communities, we investigate how innovations develop in virtual consumer groups and what motives drive members to engage in joint innovation creation. Similarly to findings from creativity research in offline contexts, we find that culture does have an influence on creative processes and expressions. While English-and Chinese-speaking online communities are similar in their high quality and quantity of creative outputs, they differ with regard to innovation patterns and the kinds of emerging innovations. From a practical perspective the findings suggest that companies that aim to collaborate with communities across cultures have to align the interaction with the members' different expectations and routines. Further, what communities consider as creative and innovative may depend on culture.
This article investigates how the enormous knowledge-pool of online communities can be used for new product development. Except for a few examples provided in the literature, little is known about how to best absorb the knowledge of online communities and incorporate it systematically into a company's innovation process. In this article, we introduce a modified form of the netnography method, an unobtrusive, qualitative research method, to access consumers' experiences, thoughts, unsatisfied needs and ideas for new product development. The netnographic approach we propose in this paper is adapted to new product development. Two introduced cases prove its practical applicability for innovation. The quantity and quality of consumer contributions impressively demonstrate the potential of online communities for new product development. Although netnography is very valuable for new product development, it is quite time consuming. Until now, no adequate software tools exist which satisfactorily enable automated data collection and analysis.
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