Digital innovation literature seldom considers the effects of innovation from app developers’ perspective. Even when it does, the findings on the value of app innovation are mixed. Based on technological innovation and early-mover advantages literature, we delineate types of app innovation and their impacts on customer evaluations. Our empirical results indicate that adding new business functions to provide new categories of product or service offerings increases customer evaluations, whereas, adding new supporting service functionalities (SSFs) decreases customer evaluations. For followers that “imitate” innovations, the effect of adding SSFs on customer evaluations is negatively contingent on the quality of early-mover apps.

数字创新文献很少从应用程序开发人员的角度考虑创新的影响。即使是这样，关于应用程序创新价值的发现也各不相同。基于技术创新和先行者优势文献，我们描述了应用程序创新的类型及其对客户评估的影响。我们的经验结果表明，添加新的业务功能以提供新类别的产品或服务产品会增加客户评价，而添加新的支持服务功能（SSF）则会减少客户评价。对于那些“模仿”创新的追随者而言，添加SSF对客户评估的影响不利地取决于早期行动者应用的质量。