UNDERSTANDING ONLINE INNOVATION COMMUNITY: AN INVESTIGATION OF GROUP DIVERSITY IN OPEN COLLABORATION

Abstract

The emergence of online innovation communities has provided a new business model to break the boundaries of innovation in organizations. Although these communities have created significant values for organizations and society, effective management of such communities is still challenging for companies and platform operators. Specifically, it is important to explore how to facilitate value co-creation as well as group efficiency in the open form collaboration. This dissertation seeks to examine open collaboration management and group formation in innovation communities to extend the literature on the effectiveness and efficiency in open innovation communities. The first essay investigates the role of knowledge variety in crowdsourced new product development. The second essay focuses on the management of individuals with diverse work styles in open source software development. Overall, my dissertation takes a group diversity perspective to examine the effective management of open innovation communities.