Exploring employee interactions and quality of contributions in intra-organisational innovation platforms

This study builds on the innovation management and organizational knowledge networks to examine the user interactions in an intra-organizational innovation platform of a Norwegian telecommunications operator, as well as the influence of user interactions on idea development. Although current studies mainly focus on user interactions and idea quality in innovation processes, little attention has been paid to the layered nature of user interactions that impact on idea development. Data from an intra-organizational innovation platform, called Explorathon, was used in an exploratory study, with a mixed-methods approach. For 10 days, 3200 employees posted 390 ideas, with 1435 comments. Results show that employees communicated through the innovation platform with 11 interaction types, eight contribution types and three collaboration types. The findings demonstrate that diverse platform interactions coexist and have a diverse impact on ideas. The authors suggest three types of contribution qualities-passive, efficient and balanced-that reflect the degree of meaningful interactions around an idea. The contribution qualities are only indicative of the content of interactions and they complement other evaluation metrics of the innovation platform. The findings also suggest that the user roles of idea contributors and platform moderators or facilitators are significant in maintaining interactions and weighted contributions over time. The study has implications both for research and practice.