Consumer-Centric Innovation for Mobile Apps Empowered by Social Media Analytics

Due to the rapid development of Internet communication technologies (ICTs), an increasing number of social media platforms exist where consumers can exchange comments online about products and services that businesses offer. The existing literature has demonstrated that online user-generated content can significantly influence consumer behavior and increase sales. However, its impact on organizational operations has been primarily focused on marketing, with other areas understudied. Hence, there is a pressing need to design a research framework that explores the impact of online user-generated content on important organizational operations such as product innovation, customer relationship management, and operations management. Research efforts in this dissertation center on exploring the co-creation value of online consumer reviews, where consumers' demands influence firms' decision-making. The dissertation is composed of three studies. The first study finds empirical evidence that quality signals in online product reviews are predictors of the timing of firms' incremental innovation. Guided by the product differentiation theory, the second study examines how companies' innovation and marketing differentiation strategies influence app performance. The last study proposes a novel text analytics framework to discover different information types from user reviews. The research contributes theoretical and practical insights to consumer-centric innovation and social media analytics literature.