A Study on Methods to Promote Social Interaction among Participants in the Online Co-creation Process: Focusing on the Front-end Process

Abstract

Background This study focused on online social interactions as non-face-to-face interactions increase due to the COVID-19 pandemic today. This study aims to identify factors that affect the smooth interaction between participants, and the outputs in online co-creation, to propose ways of using co-creation tools. Methods Based on the conversations of participants in the online co-creation empirical study, the frequency of social interaction and facilitating factors were derived. Then, a t-test was performed to compare the ideas of the groups and to confirm the difference. Finally, the effects of the facilitating factors were verified by comparing the results of the empirical study and the literature search. Results First, the most frequent ‘personal experience mention’ factor in ‘human’ is based on daily conversations between participants. Second, the ‘facilitator’s answer induction’ factor, which is the most frequent in ‘facilitator’, intentionally leads to an answer, increasing interaction. Third, the ‘shared post-it’ factor, which is the most frequent in ‘technology and material’, effectively helps online collaboration. Fourth, the ‘pre-participant experience gathering’ factor, which is the most frequent in ‘other’, increases opinion feedback by expressing ideas visually. Conclusions The ‘Silence’ domain and ‘the participant experience gathering’ factors analyzed in this study could compensate for the problem of low feasibility of ideas developed online. In addition, where online collaboration research is increasing, it is necessary to conduct a follow-up study on the participation of multi-stakeholders in online co-creation in the future based on the results of this study.