Virtual Customer Environments: IT-Enabled Customer Co-innovation and Value Co-creation - Information Technology and Product Development - page 114

the firm's product, i.e., interactions related to knowledge that underlies the different
aspects of the product life cycle. Second, customer interactions in the VCE occur in
a social or community context, a community that consists of peer customers as well
as members of the host firm. Third, interactions occur in a computer-mediated envi-
ronment, i.e., interactions are mediated (supported/constrained) by the technological
infrastructure of the VCE.
Customer interactions in the VCE vary in the nature and the level/intensity of
product-related knowledge that is transacted (Franke & Shah, 2003; Fuller et al.,
2006; Hertel et al., 2003; Wasko & Faraj, 2000). For example, interactions may
relate to different types of product knowledge - product-technology knowledge,
product-market knowledge, or product-use knowledge. The information exchanged
may also vary in terms of complexity - high-level interactions that assume much
prior knowledge about the product or low-level interactions that don't presume such
prior understanding.
The second dimension emphasizes the extent to which customer interactions
are situated in the community context. Prior studies on brand communities and
virtual groups (e.g., Fischer, Bristor, & Gainer, 1996; Muniz & O'Guinn, 2001;
McAlexander et al., 2002; Burgoon, Bonito, Bengtsson, Ramirez, & Dunbar, 2000)
have identified two characteristics as constituting the community context - the
extent to which the interaction involves the community and the extent to which
the interaction entities reveal their identity to others. Given that interactions in a
product-support-focused VCE will in general always be visible to (or involve) the
community, the interaction characteristic of interest in the current study context is
the extent to which members reveal their identity. As prior studies in computer-
mediated communication (e.g., Walther, 1994) have shown, the salient type of
identity in an online environment is not necessarily the “real-world” identity of the
participating members, but their “online” identity (which may or may not be their
real world identity). The more important issue is how consistently members main-
tain and reveal such an identity in their interactions (Walther, 1994) - and this is the
perspective that is adopted here to conceptualize member identity in the VCE.
The third dimension underlines the nature of technology mediation of the inter-
actions in the VCE. Te'eni (2001) developed a meta-model of communication in
computer-mediated environments that emphasized three characteristics - interactiv-
ity, channel capacity, and adaptiveness. Interactivity is the responsiveness (Rafaeli,
1988) or “the potential for immediate feedback from the receiver” (Te'eni, 2001,
p. 271). It can be conceptualized as human interactivity (between customers) and
machine interactivity (between a customer and the computer) (Hoffman and Novak,
1996). Channel capacity relates to the potential to transmit a high level of cues (Daft
& Lengel, 1984) and adaptiveness reflects the ability to adapt a message to a par-
ticular receiver (Te'eni, 2001). In this study context, channel capacity, adaptiveness,
and machine interactivity hold limited relevance since the interactions in the online
product support forums are largely text based and require minimal computer naviga-
tion. However, the extent of human interactivity forms an important consideration
here as product-related discussions and debates among the community members
form the primary activity in the VCE.