Social brokerage and productivity of users in online innovation networks

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the impact of social brokerage on the innovation productivity of users in online innovation networks. Innovation in online networks is leveraged by coordinated interactions between the participating users. We leverage the data of users contributing on posts between 2017 and 2019 in two community question answering (CQA) forums: Stack Overflow and Math Stack Exchange. The innovation productivity of users in such online innovation networks, as valued by other participating users is quantified by the total score they received on their contributing posts. Users occupying brokerage positions are exposed to better ideas that boost the value of their contributing posts, thus improving their total score. Again, existing users with low social brokerage are also likely to gain from resource sharing owing to their denser networks. Our econometric analysis reveals that users in online innovation networks with very low or very high values of social brokerage receive higher scores as valued by other community users. Overall, we access the data of 537,938 users in Stack Overflow contributing on 6,002,996 questions, and 7,903,416 answers, and 20,393 users in the Math Stack Exchange contributing on 488,389 questions, and 638,110 answers. We observe a U-shaped effect of the user's social brokerage on the user's innovation productivity. Our empirical findings have various implications for firms hosting online CQA forums.