Cost-efficient and multimedia-rich interaction opportunities offered by the Internet and the existence of online communities have made virtual co-creation a suitable means of creating value and improving the overall success of new products. Information technology enables new forms of producer-consumer collaboration in new product development processes. However, little research exists on consumers' experiences during virtual co-creation tasks. Drawing on the literature on organizational behavior, we introduce the construct of consumer empowerment to describe consumers' perceived influence on product design and decision making. This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study investigating how consumers are empowered through Internet-based co-creation activities. To analyze the impact of applied interaction tools, 727 consumers having taken part in virtual co-creation projects were asked about their experienced tool support, their perceived empowerment, how much they enjoyed the task, and their rea...

Emerging virtual worlds, such as the prominent Second Life, offer unprecedented opportunities for companies to collaborate with co-creating users. However, pioneering corporate co-creation systems fail to attract a satisfying level of participation and engagement. The experience users have with the co-creation system is the key to making virtual places a vibrant source of great connections, creativity, and co-creation. While prior research on co-creation serves as a foundation for this work, it does not provide adequate guidance on how to design co-creation systems in virtual worlds. To address this shortcoming, a 20-month action research project was conducted to study the user’s experience and to identify design principles for virtual co-creation systems. In two action research cycles, a virtual co-creation system called Ideation Quest was created, deployed, evaluated, and improved. The study reveals how to design co-creation systems and enriches research on co-creation to fit the virtual world context. Practitioners receive a helpful framework to leverage virtual worlds for co-creation.

The strategic importance of knowledge sharing and its relationships with organizational and managerial (i.e. environmental) factors have been well documented. The effects of some context-specific individual factors—including interpersonal trust—on knowledge sharing have also been investigated. The effects of enduring and pervasive individual factors (i.e, personality) on knowledge sharing have not been adequately described empirically. This article links personality, specifically agreeableness, a broad personality domain and propensity to trust, a narrow personality facet, to knowledge sharing via interpersonal trust, thereby clarifying substantial person-related effects within these important workplace phenomena.