Abstract
Advance in information technology allows companies and customers working together to developinnovations. Firms widely rely on this online co-creation movement through idea generation toolkitsand the underlying mechanisms of user-firms interactions become a challenging topic to investigatefor both theory and practice. Across three articles, we aim to better understand user innovationsdeterminants. In the first article proposition, we build on lead user literature to investigate the actorscontributing to external innovations. Second, we explore the notion of tool performance as mean tofacilitate innovation. We identify that online tools, such as ideation platform and Open SourceSoftware need to aggregate several conditions leading to promote innovative outputs. Finally, wefocus on the overall process allowing firms to entirely externalize the idea generation process andmethods to improve this process. We propose a theoretical model built on problem-solving and needsolution pairs theories. Overall, the findings extend both user innovation and crowdsourcing literatureand provide practical implications for virtual search for innovations. The investigations of three levelof analysis: actors, tools and methods is critical. The three articles of our thesis could help firms toincrease interactions with expert users. This research could also provide better understanding on howto design ideation toolkits to maximize innovative context. Finally, our theoretical model might helpfirms to optimize the search for innovative solutions via an adapted process for problem formulation.