关键词: 虚拟创新社区, 游戏化动力元素, 心流体验, 顾客创造力

Abstract: With the rapid development of information technology, the virtual innovation community has become an important platform for customers to participate in enterprises' innovation online. However, a considerable number of customers have the problem of insufficient innovation power and creativity. It is difficult for them to contribute novel and useful ideas to enterprises' innovation activities, which is not conducive to the improvement of enterprises' innovation performance and the sustainable development of the virtual innovation community. The customers' inherent tendency of competing, challenging and interacting with others when they are surfing on the Internet, as well as the continuous integration trend of virtual and reality, game and social networking in the current Internet platform ecology, make it a reality to attract customers to participate in enterprises' innovation online through gamification. Therefore, some virtual innovation communities have begun to introduce gamification design to community innovation activities. But it is a pity that most gamification applications have not achieved the expected results in practice. The main reason is that customers cannot get the desired internal experiences of having fun, enjoying challenge, and interacting with others online when they are experiencing those gamification applications. So how to optimize customers' innovation experience and enhance their creativity through effective gamification design is one of the important problems faced by virtual innovation communities. Based on the gamification theory and the flow experience theory, this paper analyzes the influence of gamified dynamic elements on the flow experience and customer creativity in the virtual innovation community by setting the flow experience as the intermediary and product involvement as the regulatory. The research is conducted by applying the situational experiment method and taking the customers' online participation in enterprises' innovation activities in smart phone virtual innovation communities as the research background. Different combinations are arranged according to the presence and absence of the four dimensions of the gamified dynamic elements, 16 specific virtual experiment situations are listed and ppt description materials are designed accordingly. The subjects of the research experiment are 400 college students from 6 colleges and universities in a college town of Hangzhou who are evenly divided into 16 groups at random. After the subjects in each group finish watching the specific ppt description materials fitted to a randomly assigned virtual experiment situation, they are asked to fill in the questionnaire independently, so as to complete the field experiment and data collection. Results of the data analysis are as follows: Firstly, the emotion, narration, growth and relationship dimensions of the gamified dynamic elements have a significant positive impact on customers' creativity. Secondly, the flow experience plays a partial intermediary role in the relationship between the four dimensions of the gamified dynamic elements and customers' creativity. Finally, the product involvement is an important bounded condition for the effect of the gamified dynamic elements on customers' creativity. The research expands the research vision and the application scope of the gamification theory, further deepens the research on customers' participation in enterprises' innovation online and provides some management enlightenment to the operation practice of virtual innovation communities. However, there are also some research limitations, such as the single sample group and the lack of in-depth analysis of the possible interaction effects between the four dimensions of the gamified dynamic elements.

Key words: Virtual Innovation Community, Gamified Dynamic Elements, Flow Experience, Customer' Creativity