Managing Sustainable Innovation with a User Community Toolkit: The Case of the Video Game T rackmania
Guy Parmentier, Romain Gandia · Creativity and Innovation Management · 2013
Today, innovating with a user community seems an effective strategy for developing a firm's innovation capacity. However, short‐term benefits from this collaboration are no longer sufficient, and firms are now looking to develop a sustainable relationship with users, to maintain sustainable innovation. This study furthers our understanding of the way in which a user toolkit connected to a community serves to manage innovation of an existing product or service. The literature provides a limited understanding of the role of a user toolkit in the management of a sustainable innovation approach in firms. The research is based on a longitudinal case study of the video gameTrackmania, which has an integrated toolkit connected to a large and active user community. Results confirm the crucial role of the toolkit in the construction, control and maintenance of a sustainable innovative approach with a user community. From the innovation perspective, the toolkit can be considered as a means of managing the boundary between the firm and the user community, because it enables the community to structure itself as a multi‐sided platform, where all categories of users participate in value creation. Finally, we identify four modalities for managing sustainable innovation with a user community toolkit.