The role of pre-innovation platform activity for diffusion success: Evidence from consumer innovations on a 3D printing platform
Introduction
Digital platforms are economically important (Dahlander and Magnusson, 2005; McIntyre and Srinivasan, 2017; Srinivasan and Venkatraman, 2018). Because of the increasing availability of advanced technologies, design and communication tools (Baldwin and von Hippel, 2011), digital platforms are also becoming more and more important for household sector innovators, i.e. individual consumers who innovate for themselves in their discretionary time (von Hippel, 2017). While prior literature found that many household sector innovators are self-rewarded and thus, not interested in actively diffusing their innovation (de Jong et al., 2015), an increasingly important subgroup of household sector innovators appears to engage in digital platforms to learn and, notably, is interested in successfully diffusing their innovations.
While some of these particular consumer innovators use multipurpose platforms such as YouTube or Pinterest for their do-it-yourself activities, others use more specialized platforms such as Github, Instructables or Thingiverse to develop and share their innovative developments. Platforms such as these support the innovation process as they provide opportunities for observational learning and for direct exchange with other platform participants. These opportunities are especially valuable for first-time innovators because they cannot build on experiences from prior innovations.
Further, digital platforms also help diffusing consumer innovation and this is of relevance for those consumers that are motivated to achieve social recognition or status via innovation diffusion. Individuals generally seek recognition (Lindenberg, 2013) and a high number of likes or views on innovations diffused on a platform can be a symbol of social recognition in the digital space (Burtch et al., 2019). Diffusing consumer innovation is important because it has the potential to improve social welfare (Gambardella et al., 2016), and the ecosystem of digital platforms could represent a vehicle through which household sector innovation can be made available to a broader audience.
In this study, we argue that first-time innovators can increase the diffusion success of their innovations by engaging in pre-innovation platform activities. Specifically, we propose that frequency, quality, and relatedness of pre-innovation platform activity will positively shape consumers’ likelihoods of successfully diffusing their first innovations.
We examine the relationship between pre-innovation platform activity and innovation diffusion success in the context of the largest digital platform on 3D printing, Thingiverse. Similar to open source software platforms where locally dispersed members interact online, members on 3D printing platforms can easily exchange comments on other members’ work, as well as share and further develop designs in the form of digital files (Kyriakou et al., 2017; Stanko, 2016). Digital files function as blueprints for innovations and can be transformed into 3D, thereby providing enhanced space for innovation and collaboration. Digital files can be created and shared more cost efficiently, faster and easier than physical prototypes. The context of Thingiverse is thus particularly advantageous to explore the factors that enable and shape successful diffusion of consumers’ first innovations given that members’ platform activities prior, during and after the first innovation can be observed.
Our results show that platform activity prior to developing an innovation has a positive effect on innovation diffusion success. Furthermore, we show that the frequency, the quality and relatedness of these pre-innovation platform activities are key factors strengthening this said effect. We are not only able to show these effects, but are also able to empirically test mechanisms through which these effects work. The three mechanisms through which pre-innovation platform activities drive innovation diffusion success are 1) quality of the first innovation, 2) recombining other platform members’ work into recombinant innovation, and 3) innovation documentation. Finally, we show that diffusion success on the platform develops in stages from awareness and evaluation to implementation.
Our study offers important contributions to research on household sector innovation as we highlight the role of digital platforms in promoting innovation diffusion success for a particular group of household sector innovators that can be expected to become increasingly important in the future. Motivated to learn and diffuse, these consumer innovators can use platforms to facilitate both the development and the diffusion of innovation. Our study thus, on the one hand, provides insights on the transition from platform participants to innovators. On the other hand, our results indicate that merely sharing innovations on platforms is necessary but not sufficient for diffusion success. Instead, being active and engaging on the platform via commenting, copying and familiarizing themselves with others’ work will help consumers generating first innovations that are appreciated and re-used by other platform members. We hence contribute to current research on consumer innovation because our findings shed light on the genesis and diffusion of innovation in the household sector, and ultimately, highlight a way to solve the prevailing diffusion problem. We thus provide insights into the differences between consumers who successfully develop and diffuse innovation and those who do not.
Section snippets
Household sector innovations on digital platforms
In this section, we first define household sector innovation and diffusion success and then explain how consumers in the Digital Age are motivated by social signals on platforms, thereby indicating a new form of self-reward in the household sector. We conclude the section with a review of the literature on collaborative innovation systems, including platforms.
Theory and hypotheses
In this section, we first explain typical activities of users on digital platforms. We then develop our first hypothesis in Section 3.1. based on three mechanisms through which these platform activities relate to the diffusion success of consumers’ first innovation: its innovation quality, recombinant innovation and innovation documentation. In Section 3.2., we develop a set of hypotheses on the characteristics of consumers’ pre-innovation platform activities: frequency, quality and relatedness
The 3D printing community Thingiverse
We test our hypotheses in the context of the Thingiverse platform, a website for user generated content on open source hardware designs. Members of the platform create and share digital design files related to 3D printing for free. Three-dimensional printing is a computer controlled process in which digital files are transformed into physical objects (Kyriakou et al., 2017). Because the platform provides free access to designs, ideas and information on member needs and technological trends as
Results
We conduct our analysis in two steps. First, we test our hypotheses and find strong support for the effects of pre-innovation platform activity as well as the activity's frequency, quality, and relatedness on innovation diffusion success. Second, we examine the mechanisms driving the effects of pre-innovation platform activity on innovation diffusion success and find that the results are to a large part driven by innovation quality, recombinant innovations and innovation documentation.
Discussion and conclusion
In this study, we analyze the effects of consumers’ platform activities prior to their first innovation on innovation success, i.e. the extent to which their first innovation diffuses on the platform. Our goal is to investigate under which conditions digital platforms can support the development and diffusion of innovation by an increasingly important subgroup of household sector innovators, i.e. consumers that are interested in learning and diffusion. We empirically test our hypotheses and
Funding
This research was funded by the Eugene M. Lang Foundation, New York, the Lawrence N. Field Center for Entrepreneurship at Baruch College, City University of New York and the Research Foundation of the City University of New York.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Jörg Claussen: Investigation, Formal analysis. Maria A. Halbinger: Conceptualization, Writing - original draft.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the special issue editors Nikolaus Franke, Jeroen de Jong, and Eric von Hippel as well as Nicolai Foss, Lars Frederiksen, Romi Kher, Scott Newbert, Jon Pellicoro, three anonymous reviewers, audiences at the Open and User Innovation Conference 2019, at the DRUID 2019 conference, at the AOM 2019 conference, and at the ORG seminar at LMU Munich for valuable comments and discussions and to Laura Steinke for research assistance.
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Both authors contributed equally to the development of the manuscript with different focus areas.