Engaging your employees in innovation: Co-creation motivations in online communities
Didem Nohutlu is a PhD student in the department NIKOS Centre for entrepreneurship, strategy, international business and marketing. (Co)Promotors are prof.dr. A. Groen; prof.dr. E. Constantinides and prof.dr. B.G. Englis from the faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences.
Innovation is at the heart of every business, and employees are a great source of ideas for products and services. Motivating employees to participate in co-creation in online innovation-focused communities and keeping them engaged afterwards requires an understanding of human motivation and demotivation.
The goal of this thesis is to discover the diverse motivations of employees to co-create ideas in online communities that will lead to successful innovation initiatives while bringing value to our communities. To fulfil this goal, I present the results of four research projects. The first two are focused on the customer perspective to further understand and build on the employee perspective which is a new area of research. The last two tap into the employee point of view.
As a result, the thesis contributes to the literature with the following insights:
- A taxonomy of customer motivations to co-create in online communities and a future research agenda featuring key focus areas from user, company and technical perspectives;
- A conceptual framework of antecedents and outcomes of co-creation experience in online communities, five factors that enhance a feeling of homophily or communality in online communities, and a managerial guide to create positive experiences during co-creation;
- A conceptual framework of employee motivations to participate in co-creation activities in a firm’s online innovation community and demotivation which deter employees from co-creating, as well as ideas for team leaders to encourage co-creation behaviour
- Four fsQCA (Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis) solutions and employee profiles based on configurations which show the interplay of proactive personality, gaining knowledge, career advancement, showing ideas, participative leadership and employee engagement in leading to a future willingness to engage in co-creation initiatives in company online innovation communities, the ranking of employee motivations to co-create from higher to lower importance, and demotivation of employees to participate in online co-creation initiatives.
With the knowledge from this thesis companies can train their innovation teams and leaders on how best to engage employees in co-creation initiatives in online innovation communities. This thesis also identifies future research questions for scholars to further build on this theory.
