Placing Value on Community Co-creations
Lev Poretski, Ofer Arazy · 2017
Firms developing software -- and in particular, video game producers - seek to leverage the community of users/developers in enhancing product offering and increasing sales. Despite the practical importance of this phenomena, to date little research has investigated the actual value such communities add aside from few qualitative case studies of successful synergies between commercial enterprises and open-source communities. The objective of this study is to try and quantitatively assess the effectiveness of firms' efforts to increase sales of their product through inducing community's co-creation activity. Our empirical investigation focuses on producers of video games and their user/developer 'modding' community. An analysis of 45 games reveals that when firms are successful at engaging the community, the value added by the modding community contributes to an increase in sales of the base product. Implications for research on open innovation and for practitioners are discussed.