User Communities: The Missing Link to Foster KIBS’ Innovation

In today’s knowledge-driven economy, collaboration among stakeholders is essential for the framing of innovative trends, with knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) playing a core role in addressing market demand. Users’ involvement in shaping products and services has been considered in innovation ecosystem frameworks. Fewer risks in service/product development, and more sustainability and market acceptance, are a few of the benefits arising from including the user community (UC) in innovation partnerships. However, the need for resources, absorptive capacity and tacit knowledge, among other capabilities, is often a reason for overlooking this important contributor. KIBS possess a vast knowledge base, cater to digital tools, and mediate and propel innovation with different partners, benefiting from exclusive cognitive proximity to remix extant knowledge with emergent information from communities into new products and services. The aim of this study is to assess and quantify the effect of the collaboration with UC through three active forms of collaboration (co-creation, mass customization, and personalization) on different innovation types developed in KIBS. The significance of the user community was proven across all innovation types. Robustness analysis confirmed the results for both P-KIBS and T-KIBS. P-KIBS may be better suited to co-creation policies for product and service innovation, personalization of processes, and organizational and marketing innovations. T-KIBS can focus on mass customization, ensuring good innovation success. Additionally, co-creation with user community is best for product innovation.