Unusual suspect of societal innovativeness in online social innovation community: A network and communication framework

Abstract

The widespread adoption of the social computing paradigm has ushered in the development of online social innovation community (OSIC) as a promising method for solving social problems. Previous studies have not explicitly considered the conceptual factors that facilitate these communities’ users’ innovative activities, so it is vital to conduct empirical studies to verify the effectiveness of these factors. In this paper, the primary goals are to construct a theoretical model of the social innovation and empirically verify the casual relationship between theoretical factors and societal innovativeness. A survey of 398 OSIC users was conducted to empirically validate the theoretical model. The causal relationships between network characteristics and social innovativeness were experimentally tested. The results of this study indicated that ambiguity, switching, and multiplexity are important factors that facilitate social innovativeness, which contradicts the prior assumptions about innovation performance.