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Collaborative Innovation Online: Entanglements of the Making of Content, Skills, and Community on a Songwriting Platform

2019; Emerald Publishing Limited; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1108/s0733-558x20190000064018

0733-558X

Benjamin Schiemer, Elke Schüßler, Gernot Grabher,

Innovation and Knowledge Management

Abstract This chapter advances our understanding of collaborative innovation processes that span across organizational boundaries by providing an ethnographic account of idea generation dynamics in a member-initiated online songwriting community. Applying a science and technology studies perspective on processes "in the making," the findings of this chapter reveal the generative entanglements of three processes of content-in-the-making, skill-in-the-making, and community-in-the-making that were triggered and maintained over time by temporary stabilizations of provisional, interim outcomes. These findings also elucidate interferences between these three processes, particularly when an increased focus on songs as products undermines the ongoing collaborative production of ideas. Regular interventions in the community design were necessary to simultaneously stimulate the three processes and counteract interfering tendencies that either prioritized content production, community building, or skill development, respectively. The authors conclude that firms seeking to tap into online communities' innovative potential need to appreciate community and skill development as creative processes in their own right that have to be fostered and kept in sync with content production. Keywords Collaborative innovation Innovation as process Online communities Creative content production Music industry Digitization Citation Schiemer, B., Schüßler, E. and Grabher, G. (2019), "Collaborative Innovation Online: Entanglements of the Making of Content, Skills, and Community on a Songwriting Platform", Sydow, J. and Berends, H. (Ed.) Managing Inter-organizational Collaborations: Process Views (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 64), Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 293-316. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20190000064018 Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited Copyright © 2019 Benjamin Schiemer, Elke Schüßler and Gernot Grabher License © 2019 by Benjamin Schiemer, Elke Schüßler, Gernot Grabher. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This chapter is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this chapter (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode Introduction The shift from "closed" to "open" forms of innovation in the 1990s (Chesbrough, 2003; Felin & Zenger, 2014) was preceded by various forms of inter-organizational innovation networks. Strategic alliances and joint ventures, for example, were forged by firms and their competitors, suppliers, and research partners in the 1980s to mobilize knowledge and financial resources as well as to share the risks of innovation processes (Dhanaraj & Parkhe, 2006; Sydow, Schüßler, & Müller-Seitz, 2016). Rather than internal resources located in the R&D department, external networks of firms evolved into the central "locus of innovation" (Powell, Koput, & Smith-Doerr, 1996). With the proliferation of digital technologies, innovation processes increasingly extended from closed business-to-business relationships toward a broad spectrum of interactions between businesses and globally dispersed user and consumer communities. To tap into the proverbial "wisdom of crowds" (Surowiecki, 2004), firms launched online communities (cf. von Hippel, 1976, 1978) to develop products and services jointly with users and consumers (e.g., Ansari & Munir, 2010; Grabher & Ibert, 2018; Parmentier & Mangematin, 2014). At the same time, self-organized communities began to produce non-proprietary knowledge independent of firms in areas as diverse as software development, rare disease treatments, or the production of cultural content (Benkler, 2006; Grabher & Ibert, 2013). From an inter-organizational network perspective, these different forms of online collaborative production afford potentials to harness resources that are inaccessible through corporate forms of production. As a result, innovation processes today unfold in complex ecologies of relationships among firms, online and offline communities, and digital platforms (e.g., Boczkowski, Matassi, & Eugenia Mitchelstein, 2018; Grabher, Melchior, Schiemer, Schüßler, & Sydow, 2018). Innovation in the automotive industry, for instance, involves not only strategic alliances among competing original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), but also cross-industry alliances involving developers of autonomous driving technologies, ride-hailing and open-source mapping platforms, as well as user communities. Recent research has significantly expanded our knowledge of the various types of online communities and the modes of firm-community relations (Dahlander & Magnusson, 2005; Jeppesen & Frederiksen, 2006; O'Mahony & Bechky, 2008; Porter, 2004) as well as the processes of developing online communities (Kraut et al., 2012; Ren, Kraut, & Kiesler, 2007; Wiertz & de Ruyter, 2007). This research has highlighted that organizations face the challenge that the capitalization on knowledge produced by these non-firm actors might, in fact, undermine their innovative potential by interfering with community dynamics (e.g., Cohendet & Simon, 2015; West & Lakhani, 2008). The pertinent literature has mainly focused on (1) the social dynamics of online communities underpinning the production of content (e.g., Garud, Jain, & Tuertscher, 2008; Grabher & Ibert, 2013; Jarvenpaa & Lang, 2011; West & O'Mahony, 2008); (2) the practices of knowledge sharing and advancing skills in online communities (e.g., Charband & Navimipour, 2016; Faraj, Jarvenpaa, & Majchrzak, 2011; Faraj, Kudaravalli, & Wasko, 2015; Hwang, Singh, & Argote, 2015); and, finally, (3) the processes of community building, evolution and governance (e.g., Aaltonen & Lanzara, 2015; Dahlander, Frederiksen, & Rullani, 2008; O'Mahony & Ferraro, 2007; Preece & Maloney-Krichmar, 2005). While extant studies highlight that all three dimensions of online social production are highly dynamic and interlinked in generating innovation (e.g., Aaltonen & Lanzara, 2015; Garud et al., 2008), the multifold interdependencies between dynamics of content production, skill formation, and community building over time have so far rarely been examined in a systematic fashion. In this chapter, we study online community dynamics in the context of the music industry, which is widely regarded as an exemplary case for understanding the implications of the digitization of creative content production (e.g., Dobusch & Schüßler, 2014). The music industry has undergone a number of profound changes induced by new "technological assemblages" (Leyshon, 2014, p. 10) such as by the encoding of new software formats like MP3, the emergence of internet distribution systems as well as new digitized tools for music production. Since the late twentieth century, music production has increasingly been freed from the socio-spatial constraints and financial burden of traditional studio production. Concurrently, precarious work conditions shifted music production into the realm of private reproduction (Watson, 2016). The historically dominant three major labels had to forfeit their monopoly in music production and distribution (Leyshon, 2014). In sum, the traditional vertical music industry value chain has been transformed into a complex heterarchic ecology of firms, freelance musicians, online production, and distribution platforms as well as local scenes and online communities engaging in creative content production. In order to scrutinize collaborative innovation dynamics in this unfolding new ecology, we provide an in-depth case study of the member-initiated and governed online community "February Album Writing Month" (fawm.org). The key aim of FAWM is to collaboratively produce 14 songs within the temporal constraint of a single month (in each year of its existence). By 2013, FAWM had more than 7,000 members from 30 countries (see fawm.org; Settles & Dow, 2013); in subsequent years, FAWM only displayed the number of currently active members that fluctuated between 2,300 and 2,500 active members each year. The community is not committed to complete recorded versions of finalized songs, but rather to writing and recording "song sketches" that may or may not be commercially produced later on. Similar to other online communities such as Wikipedia and Linux, the content at FAWM is collectively produced in a cumulative and open-ended process (e.g., Garud et al., 2008). In distinct contrast to Wikipedia and Linux, however, collaborative dynamics within FAWM are explicitly temporally limited to the single month of February. Despite this institutionalized termination each year, members refer to FAWM as an "online idea generator" to write songs for subsequent development. FAWM, then, epitomizes an instructive hybrid case of a temporally bracketed collaborative effort that induces open-ended generative processes. Our analysis elucidates that three parallel, tightly interwoven processes unfold simultaneously on FAWM: (1) the production of songs which we, alluding to Latour's (1987) idea of science-in-the-making as a messy and ongoing process, call content-in-the-making; (2) the development of musical and technical knowledge and respective skills to which we refer as skill-in-the-making; and (3) the production of a sense of belonging, social coherence, and friendship, which we term community-in-the-making. Our analysis demonstrates that these three processes do not necessarily support each other in generating innovation in a smooth fashion. Instead, the very dynamics that induce innovation in one process might undermine generation in another when, for example, the rating of a song induces a competitive momentum that compromises the further evolution of the community built on an egalitarian and collaborative ethos. With our analysis, we seek to advance extant knowledge in two regards. First, building on Garud et al.'s (2008) notion of "incomplete by design," we empirically substantiate the assertion that innovation in online communities cannot be reduced to a single product or process, but is more appropriately conceptualized as an ongoing production of multiple interim outcomes through three entangled processes. We demonstrate that the commitment of community members to these processes is not assured by the prospect of benefitting from final products, but by producing temporary stabilizations of provisional interim outcomes that call for further engagement of community members. Second, we reveal the crucial importance of ongoing adjustments of reinforcing structures (cf. Hargadon & Bechky, 2008) that incentivize the simultaneous production of content, skills and community to cope with the interfering dynamics of community growth, professionalization, and internal competition, thus specifying such structures for an online context. Collaborative Innovation in Online Communities Rather than the expression of an arcane genius, innovation is increasingly conceived as a collective and collaborative endeavor. As already diagnosed in the 1990s, communities of practice both within and across firms had turned into critical arenas for the collaborative production of knowledge (Brown & Duguid, 1991). With the advent of the novel socio-technical affordances of the so-called web 2.0, collaboration for innovation further shifted into the realm of geographically dispersed online communities that crystallize either around specific products or brands or are formed bottom-up independently of the corporate sector (Faraj et al., 2011; De Souza & Preece, 2004). Our focus here is on the latter type of independent communities that are neither firm-hosted nor firm-related, but still constitute an important element in the complex online and offline ecology of innovation in sectors such as the music industry. In contrast to communities of practice that revolve around a shared passion or interest and that are governed by a set of values and norms, such online communities typically share a "common subject matter of work" (Gläser, 2001, p. 7; Schiemer, 2018), as exemplified by scientific communities or open-source communities like Linux. Content-producing communities typically evolve and morph over time by shifting from content production to knowledge sharing or by broadening their focus by explicitly pursuing both goals simultaneously (e.g., Aaltonen & Lanzara, 2015; Fayard & DeSanctis, 2005). To account for these dynamics more systematically, Faraj et al. (2011, p. 1235) advocated to refocus research from the structural mechanisms of community governance or community members' motivations toward the dynamic "flow and connection of ideas over time" and the "emergent properties of collaboration." From such a dynamic perspective, technology does not determine community governance, but rather "creates the conditions in which new kinds of governance capabilities can emerge" (Aaltonen & Lanzara, 2015, p. 1667). These ongoing transformations of communities unavoidably engender challenges such as membership growth (e.g., Aaltonen & Lanzara, 2015; West & O'Mahony, 2008) or fragmentation (e.g., Garud et al., 2008) that, in turn, might be converted into a creative momentum when, for example, growth is used as an opportunity to renegotiate and reconfigure the roles, boundaries, or design of the community. Exemplified by the cases of Wikipedia and Linux, Garud et al. (2008) conceptualize the inherent and systemic "incompleteness" of socio-technical features as well as of the collaboratively produced content as the key generative attributes of open-source communities. In both communities, each design change can be seen as a form of temporary stabilization (sedimented in a version at a particular point in time) and, at the same time, a request for future activity (to revise and update a particular version). This argument resonates with the idea that information technology, rather than engendering finalized results, perpetuates the provisional and transient state of "permanently beta" (Neff & Stark, 2004). Relatedly, the processual view of Barrett, Oborn, and Orlikowski (2016) reveals how online communities simultaneously produce financial, epistemic, and reputational capital through socio-technical entanglements of digital infrastructures and agency in which tensions and frictions induce creative action (Stark, 2009). Most importantly, as these studies convincingly reveal, the socio-technical features of community design are both process and outcome: any design outcome is an intermediate step in an ongoing journey triggering further processes of community redesign and collaborative engagement. Learning in online communities, then, comes into the picture both as a process by which knowledge is encoded in routines expressing collective governance capabilities and as an outcome made possible by the evolving governance framework. (Aaltonen & Lanzara, 2015, p. 1666) Moving beyond issues of community governance, Charband and Navimipour (2016) identify factors that sustain the knowledge sharing process in online environments such as, for example, membership based on self-selection, norms of reciprocity, non-competitive environments and the asynchronicity of interaction (see also Grabher & Ibert, 2013). In a similar vein, Faraj, von Krogh, Monteiro, and Lakhani (2016, p. 669) stress the "enriched" rather than deficient sociality of online communities that "provide a generative landscape to sustain collaborative relations on a hitherto unknown scale." While knowledge sharing in the respective literature is often perceived as a practice separate from community building and content production, Faraj et al. (2016, p. 678) allude to "value-generating knowledge flows" that co-constitute the stability and design of online communities. From this perspective, content production, knowledge sharing, and community building are in fact inextricably interwoven and mutually constitutive. However, what remains unresolved to date is how this mutual constitution unfolds and is enacted over time. To address this question, we shift from a variance-ontology that views innovation as an outcome toward a process-ontology that views innovation as an ongoing activity (Fortwengel, Schüßler, & Sydow, 2017; Van de Ven, Polley, Garud, & Venkataraman, 1999). This shift implies to zoom in on the messy, non-linear processes of innovating that performatively constitute online communities instead of perceiving online communities as fixed entities that need to be designed in a particular fashion to generate innovation (Garud, Gehman, Kumaraswamy, & Tuertscher, 2016; Garud, Tuertscher, & Van de Ven, 2013; Schiemer, 2018). The study of creative problem-solving in consulting firms by Hargadon and Bechky (2006) provides an instructive illustration of this particular perspective. Collective creativity occurs in fleeting moments in time that are triggered by four types of interdependent activities: (1) "help-seeking," the active search for assistance in a problematic situation; (2) "help-giving," the response to such an inquiry; (3) "reflective reframing," the collective creation of a possibly more appropriate formulation of the search question; and (4) "reinforcing," activities that support individuals in help-seeking, help-giving, and collective reframing (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006). While this perspective, developed largely through the work of the Minnesota Innovation Research Programme around Andrew Van de Ven, is already well established in innovation research in more traditional contexts, it has hardly been employed empirically in the study of online communities. An important exception is the historical account of Wikipedia by Aaltonen and Lanzara (2015), who theorize community governance as a collective capability resting upon multiple, dynamically evolving routines. Our aim in this chapter is to apply this processual lens to empirically study collaborative innovation processes online. We draw on Latour's (1987) concept of "science-in-the-making" (that he juxtaposes to "ready-made-science") to consider content production, skill development, and community building as deeply entwined and messy processes "in-the-making." More specifically, we address the following research questions: how do dynamics of content-in-the-making, skill-in-the-making, and community-in-the-making interact to produce moments of collaborative innovation in a member-initiated online community? What is the role of online community design in providing reinforcing structures for collaborative innovation over time? Methodology Case Setting In February each year, FAWM provides an online space for professional, semi-professional, and amateur musicians to collaborate in their songwriting process. Burr Settles, a software engineer, computer scientist, and singer–songwriter launched FAWM in the United States in 2004, inspired by the website nanowrimo.org (National Novel Writing Month, with more than 200,000 members) where novelists join the collective goal in the month of November of writing a novel. Burke and Settles (2011) describe these kinds of communities as "Online Goal Setting Groups," where amateurs and professionals alike join others in committing to a challenging goal. Between 2009 and 2013, FAWM members posted 39,301 songs to the site. In 2017, when the first author joined the community, 2,338 members posted 11,168 songs on the site, 963 of which have been documented collaborations (see fawm.org). The five core activities on FAWM are (1) uploading song sketches recorded from devices ranging from cell phones to sophisticated home studios; (2) motivating other members with comments on their song sketches and giving constructive feedback; (3) collaborating directly with others on a specific song; (4) keeping track of the overall progress; and (5) participating in forum discussions. When the institutionalized deadline approaches at the end of February, the moderators close the option to upload more songs. The option to comment on songs and to post forum threads, however, remains available throughout the following year until approximately the end of December, when Settles removes the entire content from the website to subsequently instigate the next FAWM cycle on a "tabula rasa." Research Design: Online Ethnography A broad range of methodological strategies ranging from netnography (Kozinets, 2015) over multisited ethnography (Marcus, 1995) to reflexive ethnography (Davies, 2012) are available for an ethnographic engagement with online communities. Our empirical analysis of FAWM is based on a cross-platform and multisited online ethnography harvesting data from an ecology of websites such as Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Facebook, and YouTube, and, of course, FAWM. These sites were selected by following outgoing links from the FAWM website either in the descriptions of the user profiles or in forum discussions. Since activities on FAWM are not only limited to text posts (e.g., forum discussions), but also include listening, recording, uploading, and collaborating on audio material, the active participation of the first author in a reflective, auto-ethnographic fashion (Pink et al., 2015) was instrumental in collecting a particularly rich set of data. In line with a processual perspective, we study innovation at FAWM from the analytical angle of "events" (Langley, 1999) that mark critical turning points or the moments in which the various innovation dynamics interact (Langley, 2009). In order to address our research questions, we are centered on events on two different time scales. First, we zoom in on events on a small-scale, that is, on the concrete collaborative dynamics unfolding in the course of two single FAWM months. Second, we study critical moments of community redesign in the course of FAWM's entire history (from the beginning in 2004–2018). Data Collection We collected in-depth data in two successive FAWM cycles in February 2017 and February 2018. In addition to observations, the first author, who is a semi-­professional musician, joined the community twice as a musician playing the guitar and the Indian sitar, and collaboratively produced seven song sketches in the first cycle and another five in the second. Furthermore, the first author conducted 12 in-depth interviews with members and moderators via Skype and two explorative interviews with participating members of the 2016 challenge. The interview partners were sampled according to different degrees of community involvement. Through this sampling method, our analysis is not limited to the dynamics unfolding in the most active community segment, but in fact covers the entire community. "Novices" to FAWM typically act as lurkers who only passively observe, and who only have a passing interest; "minglers" are socializers who maintain strong personal ties but are only superficially interested in producing songs themselves; "devotees" are primarily interested in producing songs and developing their personal skills, rather than maintaining social ties with the community; finally, only the category of "insiders" is driven by multiple motivations, but depend on the other responses and reactions from the other categories for visibility and collaboration. The first author was able to cover each of these categories, which were developed by Kozinets (2015), with at least one interview and to interview two members in both studied FAWM cycles to monitor the development of community development over time (e.g., novices morphing into more active members). In order to track activities that shift from the online to the offline realm, the first author conducted two face-to-face interviews with local FAWM members and joined a jam session that was recorded an uploaded on FAWM. Archival data from forum posts from 2017 and 2016, field notes from observing ongoing interactions, and so-called "elicited data" (Kozinets, 2015) co-created in interaction with members and documented in the form of transaction protocols (reaching from short interactions on the platform over daily chat conversations to email conversations up to all four weeks of February) were additionally collected. For the period that preceded our participation in 2017, we used web.archive.org to access older versions by screenshots of the website from 2004 to 2016 to gain access to the development of the design and the number of members and to archived activities (see Table 12.1). Table 12.1. Data Collection from February 2017 to February 2018. Data Type 200 Hours of Observation 14 Interviews Active Participation Access Via Textual Visual Audio-visual Audio Interview Transcripts Interaction Protocols Online FAWM, Facebook, Soundcloud, Skype, Email, Chat Forum posts, Comments, Bulletin board, Profiles Photos (profile pictures, equipment, studio facilities), Screenshots from older versions YouTube videos Song recordings 11 Interviews 32 Interaction protocols Offline Face-to-face 3 Interviews Offline jam session Data Analysis Our data analysis proceeded in several steps. Based on an initial review of the literature and four exploratory interviews, we followed the production of a song through a single FAWM cycle. The coding of the initial dataset with the qualitative data analysis software NVivo aimed at categorizing the highly distributed interactions between members on FAWM on the one hand, and related interactions in other forums and social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp (the latter two are free services of online music distribution with additional features such as commenting and chat), on the other. In this initial step, we differentiated between content-oriented interactions (i.e., looking for a specific instrument or vocals for a song), skill-oriented interactions (i.e., searching for specific know-how, like how to develop a "catchy tune"), and community-oriented interactions (i.e., providing feedback, welcoming novices as emerging themes). In the second step, the first author participated in the community and archived data as they were produced in real time from forums and bulletin boards at FAWM, as well as from threads that were posted on Facebook in a closed group available only for FAWM members. This step yielded important insights into small-scale events during a single FAWM cycle that triggered processes of content production, skill development, and community building. These moments then allowed us to further examine how and when these processes intersect by advancing or obstructing each other. We identified the crucial role played by interim outcomes that not only require further engagement within a particular process, but could also induce activities in parallel and related processes so that they would be "in sync" and support each other. We also found that avoiding the interference of the three processes strongly revolved around finding means to curb competitive dynamics by transforming evaluative activities and status filters in a way that encouraged collaboration. Therefore, we extended our focus from small-scale events during a single FAWM cycle to critical events of reprograming the design of the website over the entire FAWM history when the three processes were "out of sync." The overarching goal of these re-adjustments was to ensure the "ongoingness" of the three intertwined processes. Interdependencies Between Content-, Skill- and Community-in-the-Making FAWM's principal collective goal for the production of content is quantitative rather than qualitative: each member is to produce 14 songs within the time frame of one month. The activities on FAWM, however, are not confined to achieving this particular goal, but involve dynamics beyond each individual FAWM cycle. We refer to the first process that extends beyond the singular month as content-in-the-making, since it revolves around producing music and typically results in a provisional song as an interim outcome. Even if some members use FAWM for presenting and testing a produced and polished song to the community, the community treats the song as unfinished by providing specific feedback rather than a generic rating. The activities that feed into this process are, for example, recording drafts, producing, mixing, uploading and tagging songs, and asking for specific collaborative inputs such as expertise on specific genres or specific musical instruments. The second process we call skill-in-the-making. FAWM members constantly aim at improving their mastery of particular skillsets as composers, producers, or mixers by working through various forums to find out "… what they don't know that they are not able to do yet" (Interview insider F.). In this sense, newly acquired skills constitute an interim outcome which triggers further activity such as working on content or providing know-how to the community. The third process of community-in-the-making refers to features of the ever-evolving community design such as membership rules, codes of conduct or collaborative ethos. The respective spectrum of activities ranges from welcoming novices over discussing new design elements with the technical designers (e.g., rating mechanisms) to actively searching for and entering collaborations, joining, or initiating challenges or opening off-topic discussions on forums (that neither refer to contents or skills). An interim outcome is a sense of belonging, which may trigger new collaborations on songwriting or asking for feedback and know-how. Thus, in line with a process view on innovation, we perceive content production, skill development, and community building as both processes and (interim) outcomes that precipitate further engagement to develop songs