Co-innovation Experience in Social Product Development Networks: Construct Development and Measurement Validation

Maintaining external actor engagement and participation is one of the main challenges co-innovation networks face. Prior research suggests that co-innovation sustainability depends on actor experience across the innovation cycle starting with idea generation, through product development, to commercialization. Understanding the experiential benefits affecting actors' participation, therefore, is crucial to improving the co-innovation process and outcomes. A first step toward understanding co-innovation experience is development of a valid and reliable model. This paper introduces a new construct to understand, model, and measure actor experience, and demonstrate why actor experience is critical to predicting actors' behavioral intentions and maintaining the productivity of co-innovation networks.