Abstract:   The era characterized as time-based competition and turbulent environment has come, which makes a firm be aware of the strategic importance of co-creating value with users. And interaction has been recognized as the core of value co-creation. However, the questions of what kinds of interactions will contribute to a firm′s innovation, and how a firm guides those interactions to facilitate the goal of value co-creation to be realized needs to be clarified, since a mass of interactions occurs in the firm hosted online community. The present study aims to answer the questions mentioned above by means of research design integrating quality and quantity methods based on the theory of value co-creation. Using the dataset of multi-actor′s behaviors′ traces crawled from HarmonyOS′s user online community from September 3, 2021 to February 27, 2022, this present study firstly explored the measurements of user-centered interactions after the types of user-centered interactions have been identified. Then, the impacts of user-centered interactions on firm′s innovation performance with firm′s managerial behaviors in online community as moderators have been explored. Some findings were drawn as follows: (1) The impacts of user-centered interactions on a firm′s innovations show the characteristics of sequential ambidexterity, rather than the simply judgment of co-creation or co-destruction. Specifically, interaction between mass users benefits a firm′s radical innovation performance, while reducing the firm′s incremental innovation performance. And the interactions between mass users and the firm and those between mass users and the firm′s agents, namely, expert users, will reduce the firm′s innovation performance including radical and incremental innovation performances. (2) While the contribution of mass users to a firm′s innovation performance needs higher level of user self-governance, the interaction between mass users and the firm needs higher level of firm′s instruction. From the holistic perspective of whole process of value co-creation, our findings will contribute to the theory of value co-creation by identifying which kind of user-centered interactions and how a firm′s governance mechanisms designed to instruct those interactions to benefit a firm′s value co-production. The findings will be helpful for firms to make good uses of user-centered interactions occurring in online community in practice, especially in the era of digitalization. Finally, the theoretical contributions, managerial implications and limitations have also been discussed in this paper.

Key words:  interactive co-creation, value co-creation, value co-destruction, innovation performance, HarmonyOS online community