Effective Crowdsourcing for Software Feature Ideation in Online Co-Creation Forums

摘要

Many software companies are creating firm-centric online forums for customer engagement. These forums can be an effective crowdsourcing platform for software product feature ideation and co-creation with the end users. We studied the community interaction data from the ideation forums of two software providers. Link analysis revealed that a small core community was responsible for generating a large proportion of the implemented ideas. This indicated the need to identify key users in the online forum. Our analysis showed the applicability of centrality measures such as betweenness in ranking key users. We also found that commenting was likely to produce better community formation amongst the participants than voting.