A “User-Knowledge-Product” Co-Creation Cyberspace Model for Product Innovation

To benefit from users’ co-creation knowledge in online communities, enterprises need effective methods to discover and manage co-creation users and knowledge as suggested in existing research. However, the existing methods still have their own limitations when analysing different relationships and networks. Therefore, first, this paper proposes a co-creation cyberspace super-network model for product innovation from a “user-knowledge-product” perspective to integrate the co-creation information of users, knowledge, and products. Second, to increase the accuracy of discovering, managing, and using the co-creation knowledge, three subnetworks including co-creation user network, co-creation knowledge network, and co-creation product network as well as the relationships among them are constructed and improved. Third, a well-known co-creation community in China is selected as a case to verify the feasibility and validity of the proposed model for enterprise’s product innovation. Three subnetworks and the mapping relationships among them are constructed and visualized based on the introduced User-Knowledge-Product Cyberspace model. The results from the case study validate the co-creation cyberspace constructed in this paper and provide enterprises with a comprehensive and detailed integration framework analysis model. Hence, the enterprises can use this model for user discovery, product innovation knowledge mining, and dynamic innovation knowledge basement and forecast hotspot trend in co-creation communities.