Innovation in Online Communities – Towards Community-Centric Design

Online communities are changing how companies and non-profits innovate, lower costs, tap talent, and realize new socio-economic opportunities. In this paper, online communities are predicted to be an important resource in open innovation processes, based on the emerging online community trend of sharing and collaboration among non-professional users. However, in order to take full advantage of online communities for innovation purposes, challenges to community interaction, commitment and co-creation have to be overcome. The paper describes these challenges and discusses how future developments in community-centric design can facilitate innovation. Different community-centric methods are suggested with the aim to provide a research direction for redesigning community collaboration and a new approach to innovation in the Future Media Internet. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2010.Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineeringstatus: publishe