Selecting User Community Collaborators for Innovation Management

Abstract

An organisation can be viewed as a bounded, open system effecting transactions with its external environment (Adams 1976). As innovation processes are information processes in which knowledge is acquired, processed, and transferred (Hauschildt 1992), a critical factor for successful performance is the ability of the innovating organisation to effectively gather information from and transmit information to several external domains (Keller and Holland 1975; Tushman 1977). By focussing on the external customer domain, this paper analyses how firms can gain access to a large pool of customer knowledge by integrating customers from user communities (user community collaborators) into the innovation process.