Building user communities and the co-creation of a new market
Altair Hazel Marroquin Cruz · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2016
User communities are becoming part of organizational life cycle and are helping entrepreneurial ventures enter new markets. This study aims to shed light on how entrepreneurs integrate communities in the process by which firms and a market emerge. The market for products based on open source hardware (OSHW) provides the context for this inductive, longitudinal, multi-case study research. The findings suggest that both firm and user community develop together and co-create the market with the collaboration of other external actors by following five stages (framing, enticing, convincing, reinforcing and formalizing). Entrepreneurs create a community along with the product and with the use of socio-cognitive mechanisms and emotional cues convince and engage in a conversation that strengthens the connection with the community. The study adds to the understanding of the process underlying the construction of markets by identifying how community activities and values contributed to the formation of a unique identity for the firms that permeates the market. On the other hand, the shared beliefs of a collective power lead to the emergence of collective agency that assists new firms and propel its worth to the new market. A limitation is that the cases present different starting conditions, which might require further work to increase generalizability.