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Many firms are realising that opening up traditional firm-centred innovation processes holds enormous advantages and are also trying to tap these advantages. In many areas, online communities are the driving force behind innovations and have been the subject of extensive research in the past few years. Although some of the studies conduct micro-investigations examining individual motives and activities of the community members, a second batch of investigations adopts a macro view and analyses dynamic and structural aspects in the evolution of online communities. So far, the interactions between these two levels have only undergone rudimentary examination and there is no analysis at all investigating the effects of the macro level on the actor motives for contributing. This present contribution explains the basic workings of online communities incorporating both micro and macro views for the first time as a basis on which to develop a model to explain the success of communities of innovation.
Mühlhaus et al. (Tue,) studied this question.