Previous studies showed that regular users have become an important source of innovation (called user innovation). Previous studies also suggested that two factors have significant impacts on user innovation: the social network structure of the users and neighbours' innovation performance (neighbours mean users having interactions with the focal user). However, in these studies, the influence of the two factors were only discussed separately, and it remained unclear whether these two factors interdependently affected a focal user's innovation. To examine the interplay between the network structure and the neighbours' innovation performance, we harnessed data sets from "Idea Storm", which collects data on user network and idea submission. Through panel regression analyses, we found that-within an open-network structure-the higher innovation performance of neighbours has a larger positive impact on the focal user's innovation ability. Conversely, in an enclosed network structure, neighbours' higher performance has a larger negative impact on the focal user's innovation ability. Our findings filled an important gap in understanding the interplay between the network structure and the neighbours' performance in user innovation. More broadly, these results suggested that the interplay between the neighbours and the network structures merits attention that even goes beyond user innovation.
Researchers have shown that even an individual can produce the wisdom of the crowds, called “the wisdom of the inner crowd.” However, the previous methods leave room for improvements in terms of efficacy and response time. This paper proposes a more efficient method, which required a short time, based on findings from cognitive and social psychology. The procedure is to ask participants to give two answers to the same question: first, their own estimate and, second, their estimate of public opinion. Experiments using this method showed that the averages of the two estimates were more accurate than the participants’ first estimates. That is, the wisdom of the inner crowd elicited. In addition, we found that the method could be superior to other methods in terms of efficacy and convenience. Moreover, we identified the conditions where our method worked better. We further clarify the availability and limitations of using the wisdom of the inner crowd. Overall, this paper proposes an effective and short-time method for harvesting the wisdom of the inner crowd.
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