Méthode APC

This study examines how a firm can innovate with a brand community via an inductive, longitudinal study of three brand communities. The proposed framework for building an innovative brand community features six mechanisms: animation, openness, structuring, linking, theorization, and integration that support three processes: generation, socialization and adoption of user contributions. An innovative brand community can generate valuable innovations for the firm without reducing its own vitality. It brings together lead, creative, and other types of users to create ideas and new functions, uses, and contents pertaining to innovation. On the one hand, firms that partially open their boundaries by leaving space in the process of innovation for creation and discussion can benefit from the contribution of users without suffering appropriation problems. On the other hand, brand communities should receive toolkits for creation and animation, and encourage the development of both communities and innovation.

The health crisis has highlighted online communities’ interest and effectiveness in connecting isolated people in response to urgent problems or to recreate social links. However, despite much research over the last 30 years, there is no global vision regarding the conditions and processes that act on such communities’ dynamism and allow them to reach their objectives. In other words, the conditions for online community performance have not been fully investigated. Online community performance relies on the presence of mechanisms such as socialisation, structuring, participation, commitment and common motivations. Those mechanisms are favoured by a multitude of drivers identified in the literature. This paper is aimed at presenting the current state of research on the conditions that affect online community performance. We conducted a systematic literature review of 529 sources and identified, through a selection of 178 articles, the dimensions where the understanding of performance is rarer, such as drivers related to contributions and those affecting the common motivation mechanism.