Virtual space co-creation: The perspective of user innovation

By integrating theories and findings from prior user innovation literature, the authors examine how to improve a customer's co-creation and personalization performance of virtual products by means of harnessing the complementary effects of user characteristics (leading edge status, customer knowledge, and creative self-efficacy) and firm supporting factors (user toolkits and user communities). They tested an integrated research model using survey data collected from 308 Chinese consumers who personalized their virtual spaces by utilizing the tools and supports provided on a social network service site. The authors find that the integrated model that includes both user factors and firm factors was more powerful in terms of explaining a higher variance in personalization effectiveness. They also find that leading edge status, creative self-efficacy, and user communities had stronger impacts on personalization effectiveness than did customer knowledge and user toolkits. The findings provide a broader review of user factors and firm factors for business practitioners and researchers to understand co-creation and personalization.