Identification of and Co-creation with Innovative Users in an Automobile Forum

The first step to involve users into product innovation is to identify innovative users, since research show user innovation tends to be more concentrated in the user group with obvious leading edge over others. Therefore, it is important for manufacturers to identify users with high potential to innovate and try to involve them into new product development. Moreover, the development of virtual communities provides a new opportunity to identify innovative users. Compared with traditional methods, virtual communities can be more efficient and less costly in innovative user identification. Taking advantage of Tiguan Forum of AutoHome, an online automobile forum popular in China, the article puts forward an innovative user identification method including the indicator system, data process method and user clustering method, and then gives suggestions on how to co-create with different types of innovative users. The article analyzes characteristics of innovative users in virtual communities, and formulates the indicator system based on the characteristic analysis, uses web crawler to acquire data of users and posts from the automobile forum, and designs a database to manipulate the data. Then it uses text classification technology to classify posts according to themes. Finally, it processes data to get quantified measurement for further analysis. A two-step clustering method is adopted to fulfill the user classification, i.e. (1) user BIRCH algorithm to do the pre-clustering; (2) user AGNES to fulfil the clustering. The experimental result shows that the methods is suitable for innovative user identification. The result shows that users are divided into three clusters, i.e. high-valued innovative users, medium-valued innovative users, and low-valued innovative users. The article gives suggestions on how to co-create with different types of user to make full use of their potential, and construct the Innovative User Pyramid model to illustrate the distribution of innovation users and respective co-creation methods. The distribution of innovation users is typically pyramid-shaped: high-valued innovative users occupy the top as the minority with leading characteristics, medium-valued innovative users are the a little more than high-valued innovative users and much less than low-valued innovative users, and low-valued innovative users are the majority as the cornerstone. For high-valued innovative users, manufacturers can cooperate with them; for medium-valued innovative users, manufacturers should guide users to innovate; and for low-valued innovative users, manufacturers can interact with them after the product launch to consistently improve the product