Roles on corporate and public innovation communities: understanding personas to reach new frontiers

Abstract

Innovation communities have been a focus of research over the last decade to foster and analyze how businesses and the public sector can engage customers or citizens to co-create products, strategies or services. While an applied and professional community management is seen as key, most initiators still do not understand the different personas and characters about their communities to adjust their management on an individual level and to embrace further potentials. In this paper, we analyzed 64 communities to pinpoint 11 different personas, which can be found repeatedly on either public or industry driven innovation communities. Based on our findings about their characteristics, motivation triggers and behavior on innovation communities, we offer managerial implications to enhance strategies and community management systems of innovation communities.