Organizations are increasingly using open innovation communities to gain external ideas and foster user innovation. However, mass user generated content is making idea selection a tricky and time-consuming work. From the perspective of linguistic styles, this article explores the effect of writing style cues in the content of ideas (i.e., negative emotionality, self-interest oriented, cognitive oriented, future oriented) on idea response and adoption. 1,579 ideas collected from the Fantasy Westward Journey Online Ⅱ forum are used to extract writing style cues. The hypothesis tests, via logistic regression models, demonstrate that the linguistic styles of ideas can indeed function as a signaling role and deliver novel insights into the relationship between these linguistic cues and the likelihood of idea responses and adoption. Specifically, a community member’s use of self-interest oriented, cognitive oriented and future oriented writing styles has a positive effect on idea response; negative emotionality and cognitive oriented writing styles signal more possibility of idea adoption. This study offers theoretical implications by extending the innovation management research stream to the big data era and also provides managerial implications that can lead to more effective exploitation of open innovation communities
