The purpose of this study is to clarify the characteristics of information acquisition behaviors which are related to consumer innovation.
There are some results that indicate extensive information acquisition behaviors from others may contribute to consumer innovation. The consumers implemented their innovation with the support from other consumers in user communities in which they participated (Franke and Shah 2003, Ogawa and Pongtanalert 2013). Furthermore, employing a social network perspective, lead users are positioned as bridges linking different social groups, and seem to be able to access variety of information (Kratzer et al. 2016). In addition, domain non-specific characteristics are investigated as sources of innovation and it has been shown that expertise in the outer field helped people solve problems well (Jeppesen and Lakhani, 2010), and solvers in analogous market scored higher than solvers in target market in terms of novelty (Franke, Poetz, and Schreier, 2014). While leaduserness is operationally defined as a domain specific construct, information acquisition behaviors from the outer field may also contribute to consumer innovation.
However, there are also some results that suggest information acquisition behaviors from other consumers are negatively related to consumer innovation. Lead users do not try to seek the opinions of other users to purchase goods, which demonstrates negative opinion seeking tendencies (Schreier et al. 2007). In case studies comparing Muji and Cuusoo Seikatsu, we found that the design which inhibited the direct communication of consumers to each other produced good results (Nishikawa and Honjo 2011 in Japanese).
Thus, in regard to information acquisition behaviors, our study addresses a broad research question:
➢ RQ. Are information acquisition behaviors from others positively related to consumer innovation?
To answer the question, we adopted operational measures for discovery behaviors, containing (1) questioning; (2) observing; (3) experimenting; and (4) idea networking. The measures were originally developed by Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen (2008) to compare the innovative entrepreneurs with the executives. We modified their measures to examine information acquisition behaviors of consumer innovators. The measures are defined as domain non-specific constructs, and they are fit for our purpose.
To understand information acquisition behaviors across product categories and domains, we conducted a large-scale online survey in Japan with a sample size of 5,195 respondents in the consumer panel of Macromill, a Japanese research company. The distribution of our panel samples correlates with that of the Japanese population in age, gender and, residence. This suggests that our samples are general and representative.
We classify consumer innovators and find that idea networking is negatively and significantly related to consumer innovation while it is positively related to producer innovation in the company. We also find that questioning is not related significantly and observing and experimenting are positively and significantly related to consumer innovation.
We will report the detailed results and our interpretations in the OUI2016.
