Title: Breaking the Mold: Enhancing Exaptation Through Modularity in Online Innovation Communities

中文题目：打破常规：通过模块化促进在线创新社区中的扩展适应

Speaker: Dr. Liu Yang, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Management and Marketing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Time: 2025年4月28上午 9:00-10:00

Place: 管理科研楼一楼第四教室

Abstract:

Online innovation communities (OICs) provide a fertile ground for firms to gain innovation insights from the crowd. They allow users to openly share their digital product designs. Other users can freely reuse and modify these digital designs to create new ones, demonstrating the generativity of digital designs. However, a critical issue OIC platform owners face is that the reuse and modification of digital designs often result in new designs similar to their antecedents, showing a low level of innovativeness. This poses a major challenge for OIC platform owners to maintain long-term sustainability, which ultimately leads to the failure of these platforms. To address this issue, this paper investigates how platform owners can unlock the potential of their OICs for exaptation. Exaptation refers to the emergence of a new product design that is derived from an existing one and then applied in a different context, performing a function other than its originally used function. We examine how design modularity influences exaptation by considering its different characteristics (i.e., module count, heterogeneity, and interdependence). As digital tools for designing can support the generativity of digital designs (i.e., generative support), we further examine whether generative support from a digital tool can lead to exaptation and whether the effect of modularity on exaptation is contingent upon it. Using an analysis of more than 56,000 Thingiverse digital designs, we show that modularity has mixed effects on exaptation. Generative support from a digital tool not only enhances exaptation directly but also weakens the negative effects of modularity and largely strengthens its positive effects. We contribute to innovation research by providing a nuanced understanding of how modularity influences exaptation in the digital design context. We provide practical implications for platform owners for managing innovation within their OICs.

Bio:

Dr Liu Yang is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Marketing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research focuses on digital innovation, open innovation on digital platforms, and digital ventures. Particularly, he is interested in investigating how reusing openly shared digital artifacts influences further innovation on open platforms. His research areas include open design platforms, crowdsourcing, blockchain-based platforms, etc. His research has been presented at top conferences on information systems and published in reputable journals.