Factors facilitating user projects success in co-innovation communities.

Purpose Many users build personal projects in co-innovation community to accomplish their innovations. However, very few projects from such communities are successful and understanding of this phenomenon is limited. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors facilitating user projects success in online co-innovation communities. Design/methodology/approach Based on the theories of persuasion and diffusion of innovation (DOI), a conceptual model is proposed to explain how project success likelihood is affected by the creator, project and user participation characteristics. Then, the model and hypotheses are tested through binary logistic regression on a secondary data set of 572 projects collected from a typical user co-innovation community, Local Motors. Findings The results show that creator characteristics (prior success rate), project characteristics (project popularity, length and duration) and user participation characteristics (participation users and degree) have significant and positive impacts on project success likelihood. The number of prior projects, which can hardly represent the creator's credibility in open and unrestricted situations, has no significant influence on the project success likelihood. Practical implications This study offers project creators the keys to increase their projects successful possibility. Besides, this study recommends a new way to attract users and helps to identify creative and effective users for community practitioners. Originality/value This study expands the research scope in online co-innovation community by focusing on user personal projects. In addition, it combines persuasion theory and DOI theory to add the holistic understanding of user project success likelihood.