Fulfillment of higher-order psychological needs through technology: The case of smart thermostats

Smart home technologies (SHTs), such as smart thermostats, are a growing commercial opportunity. SHTs can offer a broad spectrum of potential functional, experiential and esthetic benefits, yet much of the prior research on the adoption of SHTs has been limited by a narrow TAM-based functional view. Relatively little is known about the salient user beliefs related to the experiential and esthetic benefits of SHTs that may affect SHT adoption. To address this gap in research, we conduct a mixed-methods study, wherein we inductively develop a set of factors that reflect salient user considerations associated with smart thermostats and we examine the effects of the elicited factors on the smart thermostat adoption intention. We find that performance expectancy, emphasized by TAM, has a relatively minor effect on the smart thermostat adoption intention and effort expectancy has no effect at all. We identify a novel factor, which we term techno-coolness, as the key predictor of the adoption intention in this context. Techno-coolness is a multidimensional construct that encompasses the perceptions that the technology can make a home look modern and futuristic, can make the user feel technologically advanced, and can be fun to use. Techno-coolness reveals that the technology capacity to fulfill higher-order psychological needs can dominate purely functional considerations in innovative technology adoption decisions.     

基于改进网络志方法的开放式创新社区中领先用户识别研究

领先用户在开放式创新社区中发挥着重要作用,成为产品创新的有力推动者。但网络环境下领先用户识别的研究刚刚兴起,相关研究非常缺乏。本文首先对开放式创新社区中领先用户特征进行理论研究,提出需求领先力、活跃表现力、社区影响力三大特征。然后基于改进的网络志方法,将定性的网络志和定量的数据分析结合,构建了识别领先用户的理论步骤。遵循社区选择原则,以知乎社区扫地机器人版块103位用户为研究对象,对用户的提问数、回答数等7个指标进行因子分析和聚类分析,识别出2位领先用户;并采用扎根理论,比较发帖内容和未来市场上扫地机器人新产品功能,发现领先用户提出的大部分建议会体现于未来新产品功能上,证明了领先用户识别方法的有效性。研究有助于完善领先用户识别方法,并为后续领先用户行为研究奠定坚实基础。     

用户创业研究综述及未来展望

用户因当前产品或服务无法满足自身需求,而主动进行创新并将其商业化的过程称为“用户创业”。用户创业主体及其创业活动均呈现独特性,然而现有研究主要从各自研究视角关注用户创业的某方面问题,缺乏对用户创业进行全面揭示。基于此,本研究在系统梳理经典文献基础上首先界定用户创业内涵,随后提炼用户创业动机,梳理用户创业的关键影响因素,进一步从机会开发和资源开发视角解析用户创业活动独特性,最后总结用户创业结果。在此基础上,本研究构建用户创业的综合研究框架,总结当前研究不足并展望未来研究方向,为后续研究奠定基础。     

Another pathway to complementarity: How users and intermediaries identify and create new combinations in innovation ecosystems

The value that users might derive from products and services increasingly depends on their complementarity with other products and services. Whereas prior work has emphasized how firms and complementors design for complementarity, we shift attention to how complementarity arises in use. This study is situated in the smart home market where digital products offer an unbridled range of conceivable combinations, and users may combine products in their system of use that are not initially designed for complementarity. Through a multi-method multiple case study, we distinguish a user pathway besides a producer pathway to establishing complementarity. Complementarity presupposes both the identification of complementary combinations as well as creating technical compatibility between products. In the producer pathway, firms focus mostly on creating technical compatibility while in the user pathway, users identify complementary combinations that go beyond those foreseen by firms. Intermediary toolkits can assist users in creating combinations, and we find that, ultimately, the user pathway also facilitates the producer pathway. Our findings offer insights into the important role of users and intermediaries in innovation ecosystems and extend the scope of user innovation.     

The development of a user network as a way to re-launch an unwanted product

A common situation in product development is that of product failure and the need for re-launch. This paper presents findings regarding how one firm successfully re-launched a product through the ex-post development of a user network. The producer, Biacore, had to re-launch its biosensor product or lose a €50 million investment. The firm identified and interacted with multiple potential lead-users in order to generate new use applications. The firm benefited from the successful development of a set of new applications, innovative users, and sales. As sales of the product increased, Biacore created marketing channels as diffusion mechanisms for the encouragement of direct and indirect user-to-user interaction. These were a way to spread the costs of user support when the firm standardised how it interacted with users. Some follower-users were able to benefit from lead-users who became lead teachers; other follower-users became non-users of the product. This paper illustrates three main roles for the firm in developing a user network: creating lead-users, organising directed applications development and facilitating user-to-user interaction.     

Does lead userness foster idea implementation and diffusion? A study of internal shopfloor users

While the relevance of lead users has been well established for the early phases of the innovation process, such as ideation and creativity, the relationship between lead userness and implementation and diffusion has not been investigated. This is surprising, as the conjecture that lead user ideas are more likely to be implemented and diffused than non-lead user ideas is a key tenet of lead user research. To test this conjecture we draw on a sample of 87 internal process users in a large electronics firm who submitted ideas to an idea management system. 452 ideas were suggested, of which 148 were implemented and 33 further diffused on the shopfloor. We find that higher lead userness is positively and significantly associated with the likelihood of suggested ideas being implemented and diffused. This effect is substantial: Ideas coming from lead users were more than two times more likely to be implemented and more than three times more likely to be diffused than ideas coming from non-lead users. We conclude that lead user ideas are more likely than non-lead user ideas to be implemented and diffused throughout a social system, which arguably constitutes the ultimate success of any idea. Our research contributes to research on (internal) lead users, idea management systems, and idea implementation and diffusion.     

互联网开放式创新社区用户画像构建及用户创新需求识别

本文通过分析互联网开放式创新社区用户参与创新行为，采集用户知识共享的不同特征数据，构建用户画像，从而识别不同类别用户参与平台知识创新的功能和角色。此外，基于用户的异质性，分析不同用户群体的创新需求差异和需求点的分布。通过对小米社区的实证研究识别出了核心用户、积极创新用户、积极社交用户、潜在创意用户、边缘用户这5个类型用户并进行画像，同时从必备型需求、魅力型需求、期望型需求、沉默型需求这4个角度对不同类型用户的创新需求点进行分析，体现了不同类型用户的不同创新需求差异。通过用户画像构建以及用户创新需求识别，达到社区管理与用户之间的高匹配度及用户的创新需求与企业产品创新方向之间的一致性。     

互联网虚拟品牌社区产品创新绩效研究

在网络虚拟品牌社区（OUIC）前端创新环节,企业是否参与、何时参与、如何参与知识创造管理不仅会影响到企业的产品创新绩效,甚至会影响企业在市场中的核心竞争力。本研究选择具有一定高新技术信息支撑的家电电器行业OUIC为研究背景,引入创意组合管理（IPM）为研究的核心变量,通过构建不同创意主题发布模式（B端创意主题与C端创意主题）与不同前端创新阶段（创意产生阶段与创意发展阶段）的2×2组间设计来验证相关命题。结果表明,针对不同创意主题社区,企业采取的不同决策行为,对产品创新绩效均存在显著差异。（1）证明了不同创意主题发布模式（B端创意主题或C端创意主题）,会对用户的知识创造力产生差异性影响。B端创意主题（企业主导发布）,企业可以引导社区用户重点进行新产品核心子系统相关创意的开发;C端创意主题（用户主导发布）,企业可以引导社区用户重点进行新产品周边子系统相关创意的开发。（2）验证了在用户参与OUIC 前端创新环节知识创造过程中,企业实施创意组合管理（IPM）对用户知识创造力与产品创新绩效产生的正面显著效果。（3）验证了用户参与OUIC前端创新环节知识创造过程中,企业对用户创新行为的最佳干预时机。在B端创意主题（企业主导发布）下,企业在创意产生阶段（第一阶段）实施创意组合管理（IPM）为最佳导入时机;C端创意主题（用户主导发布）下,企业在创意发展阶段（第二阶段）实施创意组合管理（IPM）为最佳导入时机。研究在理论上不仅丰富和完善了虚拟经济营销管理相关理论,而且在应用上有助于企业利用互联网工具为产品创新发掘新的途径,并培育企业市场核心竞争力。     

Using profile expansion techniques to alleviate the new user problem

Collaborative Filtering techniques have become very popular in the last years as an effective method to provide personalized recommendations. They generally obtain much better accuracy than other techniques such as content-based filtering, because they are based on the opinions of users with tastes or interests similar to the user they are recommending to. However, this is precisely the reason of one of its main limitations: the cold-start problem. That is, how to recommend new items, not yet rated, or how to offer good recommendations to users they have not information about. For example, because they have recently joined the system. In fact, the new user problem is particularly serious, because an unsatisfied user may stop using the system before it could even collect enough information to generate good recommendations. In this article we tackle this problem with a novel approach called “profile expansion”, based on the query expansion techniques used in Information Retrieval. In particular, we propose and evaluate three kinds of techniques: item-global, item-local and user-local. The experiments we have performed show that both item-global and user-local offer outstanding improvements in precision, up to 100%. Moreover, the improvements are statistically significant and consistent among different movie recommendation datasets and several training conditions.     

领先用户研究:概念,测量与影响因素

研究领先用户,可以了解未来市场发展趋势和捕捉用户需求变化,开发更具市场潜力的新产品或服务等,并增加企业新产品或服务的竞争优势。但相关研究尚未成熟,且国内研究十分缺乏。基于相关外文数据库对领先用户理论研究的重要成果进行了梳理,深入分析了领先用户的概念、量表与测量和影响因素等。研究发现：（1）领先用户是指在特定领域处于重要市场前沿地位（领先市场趋势）,并期望从满足需求的解方案中获得高收益（高期望收益）的用户;（2）量表包括领先市场趋势和高期望收益两个基本维度;（3）影响因素由领域相关变量、领域独立变量和动机构成。最后,对未来研究方向进行了展望,以期为国内学者进一步研究领先用户及企业与领先用户合作进行新产品开发提供参考。     

Revealing the complexity of users’ intention to adopt healthcare chatbots: A mixed-method analysis of antecedent condition configurations

Healthcare chatbots provide a professional, immediate, and low-cost tool for advising people on health information. Unlike previous studies on chatbot adoption that focus on the one-way net effect of components, this study reveals the complex antecedent configurations behind online healthcare chatbot adoption through an asymmetric approach. This study attempts to explain the causal configuration of user adoption in terms of three dimensions: functional, social, and user motivation features. A sequential mixed-method approach was chosen and a two-stage study, fuzzy set comparison analysis (fsQCA), and semi-structured interviews were conducted to deepen users' understanding, perceptions, and attitudes toward online healthcare chatbots, expressing more fine-grained insights into variable relationships. Five configurations were found to explain the high willingness of users to adopt healthcare chatbots. Perceived social presence was a core condition for each configuration. However, the social features of chatbots can only lead to high levels of trust and satisfaction when combined with functionality. The findings of this paper's mixed-method design and complexity study contribute to the adoption and theoretical literature on intelligent health services and chatbots. It guides tailoring chatbot functionality to individual user needs and provides practical guidance for the development of chatbots for health services through diverse combinations of machine chatbot features and user-motivated features.     

The dominant role of users in the scientific instrument innovation process

A sample of one hundred and eleven scientific instrument innovations was studied to determine the roles of instrument users and instrument manufacturers in the innovation processes which culminated in the successful commercialization of those instruments. Our key finding was that approximately 80% of the innovations judged by users to offer them a significant increment in functional utility were in fact invented, prototyped and first field-tested by users of the instrument rather than by an instrument manufacturer. The role of the first commercial manufacturer of the innovative instrument in all such cases was restricted, we found, to the performance of product engineering work on the user prototype (work which improved the prototype's reliability, ‘manufacturability’, and convenience of operation, while leaving its principles of operation intact) and to the manufacture and sale of the resulting innovative product. Thus, this research provides the interesting picture of an industry widely regarded as innovative in which the firms comprising the industry are not in themselves necessarily innovative, but rather — in 80% of the innovations sampled — only provide the product engineering and manufacturing function for innovative instrument users.We term the innovation pattern observed in scientific instruments a ‘user dominated’ one and suggest that such a pattern may play a major role in numerous industries.     

Assessing user-specific difficulty of documents

On the web, a huge variety of text collections contain knowledge in different expertise domains, such as technology or medicine. The texts are written for different uses and thus for people having different levels of expertise on the domain. Texts intended for professionals may not be understandable at all by a lay person, and texts for lay people may not contain all the detailed information needed by a professional. Many information retrieval applications, such as search engines, would offer better user experience if they were able to select the text sources that best fit the expertise level of the user. In this article, we propose a novel approach for assessing the difficulty level of a document: our method assesses difficulty for each user separately. The method enables, for instance, offering information in a personalised manner based on the user’s knowledge of different domains. The method is based on the comparison of terms appearing in a document and terms known by the user. We present two ways to collect information about the terminology the user knows: by directly asking the users the difficulty of terms or, as a novel automatic approach, indirectly by analysing texts written by the users. We examine the applicability of the methodology with text documents in the medical domain. The results show that the method is able to distinguish between documents written for lay people and documents written for experts.     

3D打印技术“峡谷”跨越影响因素研究

基于技术采用生命周期"峡谷"理论,从市场、技术、产品和消费者维度对3D打印技术"峡谷"及跨越影响因素进行探讨。通过问卷找到现实和潜在用户,由现实采用者判断当前该技术处于"峡谷"左端,用户以企业、政府为代表,潜在采用者是"峡谷"右端早期大众市场用户代表,是跨越"峡谷"的关键。进一步对潜在采用者分析发现"技术派"最有可能成为"峡谷"跨越的早期大众市场中的单一缝隙市场,"实用派"是进一步可扩展的细分市场。     

From swiping to casual sex and/or committed relationships: Exploring the experiences of Tinder users

To better understand if and how the mechanics of the process Tinder imposes on its users (i.e., swiping, matching, and starting conversations) influences the resulting sexual or romantic interactions, we collected data from 1038 Belgian Tinder users. Our findings show that a user's swiping quantity does not guarantee a higher number of Tinder matches, women have generally more matches than men and men usually have to start a conversation on Tinder. Moreover, while conversations were positively associated with reported offline Tinder encounters, less than half of our sample reported having had an offline meeting with another Tinder user. Whereas more than one third of these offline encounters led to casual sex, more than a quarter resulted in the formation of a committed relationship. Such findings indicate that Tinder is not “just a hookup app”, as often assumed in public discourse. We argue it is plausible that sexual encounters will eventually lead to committed relationships in a society where initiation of relationship formation with dating has been replaced by hooking up.     

用户参与与企业NPD绩效关系研究——以跨界协调为中介

    用户参与企业创新是提高新产品开发绩效的重要手段,但在吸纳用户参与自身创新过程时,企业需要在开放式创新的价值共创之利与管理复杂性之弊之间进行权衡。不同类型用户参与对企业NPD效应的差异及影响机理仍未得到充分揭示。基于创新理论与组织理论,采用444份国内企业样本,探索用户作为企业外部能动的创新源参与到企业创新过程中,对企业的组织协调机制及技术创新绩效的影响。发现：企业吸纳用户参与创新将有利于提升NPD绩效,但不同模式的用户参与提升企业NPD绩效的组织过程存在差异;用户以信息提供的方式参与企业创新,对企业NPD提升效应最强;组织跨界协调在用户参与提升企业NPD绩效的过程中起中介作用,特别是,对于用户作为独立创新者的参与方式,企业须经由正式设计的跨职能沟通机制,才能真正利用其有效贡献于企业NPD绩效的提升,否则用户独立创新可能对企业NPD绩效造成损害。文章最后讨论了理论贡献、管理意义与研究局限。     

Social and Q&A interfaces for app download

Downloading software via Web is a major solution for publishers to deliver their software products. In this context, user interfaces for software downloading play a key role. Actually, they have to allow usable interactions as well as support users in taking conscious and coherent decisions about whether to accept to download a software product or not. This paper presents different design alternatives for software download interfaces, i.e. the interface that prompts the user if he wishes to actually complete its download, and evaluates their ability to improve the quality of user interactions while reducing errors in user decisions. More precisely, we compare Authenticode, the leading software download interface for Internet Explorer, to Question-&-Answer, a software download interface previously proposed by the authors Dini, Foglia, Prete, & Zanda (2007). Furthermore, we evaluate the effect of extending both interfaces by means of a reputation system similar to the eBay Feedback Forum. The results of the usability studies show that (i) the pure Question-&-Answer interface is the most effective in minimizing users incoherent behaviors, and (ii) the differences in reputation rankings significantly influence users. Overall results suggest guidelines to design the best interface depending on the context (brand reputation and product features).     

Understanding the adoption of location-based recommendation agents among active users of social networking sites

Nowadays, using increasingly granular data, from real-time location information and detailed demographics to consumers-generated content on the social networking sites (SNSs), businesses are starting to offer precise location-based product recommendation services through mobile devices. Based on the technology acceptance model (TAM), this paper develops a theoretical model to examine the adoption intention of active SNS users toward location-based recommendation agents (LBRAs). The research model was tested by using the Partial Least Squares (PLS) technique. The results show that perceived usefulness, perceived control, and perceived institutional assurance are important in developing adoption intention. Perceived effort saving, special treatment, and social benefit have influences on the adoption intention through the mediating effect of perceived usefulness. Perceived accuracy has direct influence on adoption intention.     

Does a contextualized theory of planned behavior explain why teenagers stay in virtual worlds?

Academics and business practitioners are intrigued by the factors that foster continued user engagement in virtual worlds (VWs). It is unclear how, and to what extent, existing theories can explain their continued use. As young people constitute the majority of VW users, understanding the reasons for their continued use intentions is important. Taking the distinctive features of VW services into account, such as the visibility of users’ actions to other users, we contextualize the Theory of Planned Behavior and investigate the role of teenagers’ attitudes, social influences and perceived behavioral control as the determinants of their continued intention to use VW. We then apply a set of constructs from prior Information Systems (IS) literature to decompose these constructs. By analyzing primary data collected from 923 users of Habbo Hotel, a leading virtual world for teenagers, this study confirms the role of users’ intrinsic motivation, interpersonal influence and self-efficacy as key constituents of sustained user engagement in VWs. In addition, we demonstrate that decomposing these three established constructs can capture many of the key contextual characteristics of VWs. The study contributes to the literature by showing that IS theories and constructs are appropriate for the VW setting and teenage users.     

Evaluating combinations of ranked lists and visualizations of inter-document similarity

We are interested in how ideas from document clustering can be used to improve the retrieval accuracy of ranked lists in interactive systems. In particular, we are interested in ways to evaluate the effectiveness of such systems to decide how they might best be constructed. In this study, we construct and evaluate systems that present the user with ranked lists and a visualization of inter-document similarities. We first carry out a user study to evaluate the clustering/ranked list combination on instance-oriented retrieval, the task of the TREC-6 Interactive Track. We find that although users generally prefer the combination, they are not able to use it to improve effectiveness. In the second half of this study, we develop and evaluate an approach that more directly combines the ranked list with information from inter-document similarities. Using the TREC collections and relevance judgments, we show that it is possible to realize substantial improvements in effectiveness by doing so, and that although users can use the combined information effectively, the system can provide hints that substantially improve on the user's solo effort. The resulting approach shares much in common with an interactive application of incremental relevance feedback. Throughout this study, we illustrate our work using two prototype systems constructed for these evaluations. The first, AspInQuery, is a classic information retrieval system augmented with a specialized tool for recording information about instances of relevance. The other system, Lighthouse, is a Web-based application that combines a ranked list with a portrayal of inter-document similarity. Lighthouse can work with collections such as TREC, as well as the results of Web search engines.