Identifying innovative users and their ideas is crucial, for example, in crowdsourcing. But, analyzing large amounts of unstructured textual data from such online communities poses a challenge for organizations. Therefore, researchers started developing automated approaches to identify innovative users. Our study introduces an advanced machine-learning approach that minimizes manual work by combining transfer learning with a transformer-based design. We train the model on separate datasets, including an online maker community and various internet texts. The maker community posts represent need-solution pairs, which express needs and describe fitting prototypes. Then, we transfer the model and identify potential user innovations in a kitesurfing community. We validate the identified posts by manually checking a subsample and analyzing how words affect the model\u27s classification decision. This study contributes to the growing portfolio of user innovation identification by combining state-of-the-art natural language processing and transfer learning to improve automated identification
