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The current landscape of competition today is forcing companies to radically change their way of thinking and create new paradigms of innovation and collaboration with customers. Growing business challenges, shortening product life cycles, and increasing product complexity are continuously driving the need to develop and manage innovation opportunities and support customers to contribute to innovation processes (Olmedilla, Send, & Toral, 2019). To turn customers' contributions into added value and discover innovative ideas worth pursuing and implementing, companies rely heavily on knowledge sharing and user generated content (UGC) to create new paradigms of consumer collaboration and interaction, commonly referred to as online open innovation communities (OOICs) (Troise, Matricano, & Sorrentino, 2020). The concept of OOIC was originally coined by Chesbrough (2003), who described it as an internet-based collaborative innovation platform that leverages the innovation contributions of external users and focuses on solving product problems or developing novel products, services, and processes. The strength of OOICs lies in their potential to enable constellations of networking and bundling heterogeneous knowledge pools, in which different actors can collaboratively participate in the exploration and development of new products, services, processes or business models (Antons, Grünwald, Cichy, & Salge, 2020; Chesbrough, 2019; Elia, Messeni Petruzzelli, & Urbinati, 2020).
With the rapid development of Web 2.0 technologies, coupled with the increasing external knowledge transfer activities and platforms, OOICs have increasingly become one of the most popular mechanisms for companies to understand consumers preferences and needs, collect external knowledge resources from external stakeholders and support their open innovation and collaboration practices (Bogers et al., 2017; Dong & Wu, 2015; Gao, Ding, & Wu, 2020). Especially in the context of digital products and services, OOICs offer collaborative innovation spaces and thus can act as an important source of cyclical and sustainable innovation (Chesbrough, 2019). In recent years, many companies have implemented different types of OUICs to incorporate external knowledge and contributions at different stages of innovation development in the form of ideas, patents, products and business models, which the company would never have created due to lack of time, internal knowledge and resources (Chesbrough, 2019; Martínez-Torres, Rodriguez-Piñero, & Toral, 2015). Typical examples of such firm-hosted OOICs include Dell IdeaStorm Community, Starbucks MyStarbucks Community, Huawei EMUI Community Forum, Xiaomi Global Community, Samsung Community and Haier Creative Community. In all these cases, the openness of knowledge and the exclusion of proprietary exploitation patterns constitute the basis for decentralized cooperation among members and characterize the form of coordination of innovation communities (Chesbrough, 2019; Shaikh & Levina, 2019). Furthermore, the communities are directly focused on the products and services of the individual companies, and members contribute by suggesting innovative ideas or simply by sharing their preferences and needs (Olmedilla et al., 2019).