A review and prospect of the research on user entrepreneurship

Abstract

Abstract: With the development of Internet technology and the prosperity of the platform economy, the phenomenon that users act as the main body of innovators and entrepreneurs keeps emerging. This has attracted extensive attention from both practice and the academia. Specifically, user entrepreneurship refers to the phenomenon that users take the initiative to innovate or improve products due to their unmet needs and provide them to the market. In recent years, the research on "user entrepreneurship" has been growing quickly and its content has been gradually enriched. To be specific, the current research has gradually expanded from the initial description of the path of user entrepreneurship to the study of the subject, motivation, and influencing factors of user entrepreneurship. With the deepening of the research, the differences between user entrepreneurship and traditional entrepreneurship become more obvious. This represents its potential research value. In practice, in recent years, extant firms pay more attention to communication with users and even try to attract consumers to join the process of value creation by building communities. Therefore, users are not only the buyers of products, but also can participate in the creation of product value through interaction with firms. Some users have gradually changed from passive "consumers" to active "innovators", and they can even transform into "entrepreneurs" by gathering lots of consumers for collective creation and further realize the reversal of user identity. In terms of theory, although more and more scholars have paid attention to user entrepreneurship and carried out theoretical research, the current research is still not comprehensive. Many questions, such as the outcome of user entrepreneurship, have not been explored in depth. At the same time, most of the existing research focused on individual issues such as the identity transformation of user entrepreneurs and the exploration of users′ entrepreneurship motivations. Those questions are relatively fragmented and lack of systematic research. Based on this, this study tries to reveal the current research on user entrepreneurship comprehensively and provide guidance and suggestions for future research.
Through the systematical analyses of the connotation, motivation, influencing factors, and entrepreneurial process of user entrepreneurship, this study analyzes the current research status: (1) there are two kinds of user entrepreneurs according to the identity attributes. One is the professional-user entrepreneur who uses a product in their professional life and experiences a need for improvement. The other is the end-user entrepreneur who innovates products based on daily use. (2) The entrepreneurial motivation of user entrepreneurs includes not only intrinsic motivation such as dissatisfaction with the product, the pleasure of starting a business, the feeling of enjoyment, the passion to accept the challenge, the faith to succeed, but also extrinsic motivation such as social network relationship and economic benefit. Besides, unlike traditional entrepreneurship driven by economic interests, user entrepreneurship is mainly driven by intrinsic motivation. (3) The influencing factors of user entrepreneurship include the entrepreneur′s individual factors such as prior knowledge, educational background, and multiple identities as well as the community factors such as the diversity of community member background, the relationship strength of community members, and community size. (4) Activities of user entrepreneurship are realized mainly based on community interaction, especially the user entrepreneur who need complete resource development and opportunity development based on participating in community interaction. (5) The results of user entrepreneurship can be roughly divided into three categories: failure, merger, and success.
The research on user entrepreneurship is still in its infancy, and there are still many valuable academic issues to be analyzed and discussed in the future. Based on the above literature review, this study puts forward five possible research directions as follows. (1) We need to further improve the conception of user entrepreneurship by combining specific cases under the Chinese context. At the same time, we should construct the dimensional system and developing the questionnaires of user entrepreneurship. (2) About the motivation of user entrepreneurship, we need to explore the interaction effect of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation on user entrepreneurs′ decisions; on the other hand, it is necessary to deeply explore the influence mechanism of entrepreneurial motivation on entrepreneurial activities, and reveal the influence mechanism of entrepreneurial motivation on subsequent entrepreneurial activities. (3) We should further construct the system of influencing factors and explore the relevant internal influencing mechanism between those influencing factors and user entrepreneurship activities. (4) We need to pay more attention to the outcome variables of user entrepreneurship, establish a systematic evaluation system of entrepreneurial outcomes, and deeply explore how user entrepreneurship activities affect the entrepreneurial outcomes. (5) Finally, we should construct a comprehensive research model to deeply explore the internal influence relationship among users′ entrepreneurial motivation, entrepreneurial activities, and entrepreneurial results. Further, we need to explore how entrepreneurial motivation drives subsequent opportunity development and resource development, and then influence entrepreneurial results, and test the moderating role of influencing factors.

Key words: user entrepreneurship, user community, entrepreneurial motivation, opportunity development, resource development

Yin Miaomiao, Feng Xinying, Zhou Bingyu. A review and prospect of the research on user entrepreneurship[J]. Science Research Management, 2021, 42(9): 17-23.

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