Topic Prevalence and Reuse in an Open Innovation Community

In open innovation communities, concepts and topics get reused, combined and modified by many participants. In this paper, we utilize Wikipedia category structure as our ontology to automatically identify the topics covered in Climate CoLab contest proposals with the aim of better understanding how topic prevalence affects reuse and contest success. The general finding, based on analysis of the Climate CoLab contest proposals in 2015, is that while proposals that have more prevalent topics are more likely to be reused, they are are less likely to advance to semifinalist status. These findings provide insights to knowledge reuse and intelligence evolution in open innovation communities and provide ways to improve future open innovation community designs.

Keywords: Knowledge reuse, Topic Prevalence, Online community, Wikipedia, Ontology

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Ozturk, Pinar and Han, Yue and Towne, W. Ben and Nickerson, Jeffrey V., Topic Prevalence and Reuse in an Open Innovation Community (2016). Collective Intelligence 2016, Stevens Institute of Technology School of Business Research Paper No. 2801285, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2801285