New Product Development with Facebook Fans: Idea Contest Experiment

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 연세대학교 경영연구소
· 수록지 정보 : 연세경영연구 / 53권 / 1호 / 1 ~ 41페이지
· 저자명 : 아야카오다, 배성주, 박세범

초록

Involving users into the innovation process has been considered important and effective. Howe (2006) coined the term crowdsourcing to refer to “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designed agent and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.” Thanks to the Internet, involving the crowd into the new product development process has become easier, and one way to do so is to conduct an idea contest. Many firms have used virtual communities or open innovation intermediaries to conduct idea contests; however, because of the embedded social network, Facebook, one of the most popular social networking websites, appears to be a promising platform for firms to obtain the interests of many individuals. Functions, such as Like button, allow the information to spread like a ‘virus’ among Facebook users.
Thus, in this study, we took an initiative to set up an idea contest on Facebook, contributing to the past literature on both idea contests and Facebook. The purpose of this study is to test a hypothesized model that examines users’ motivations for contributing to the idea contest and the resulting company-customer relationship. Students from one of the largest universities in Korea participated in the idea contest, and the model was tested using partial least squares. The findings suggest that self presentation and monetary rewards serve as important motivations to contribute to the idea contest. Also, higher contribution to the idea contest was found to result in higher intentions for positive word-of-mouth and willingness-to-purchase behavior of the participants. In our post-hoc analysis, we categorized fans into four groups and found interesting differences among those groups for the motivations to participate in the idea contest. These findings have important theoretical and managerial implications.

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