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The Emergence of the Crowd-based Organization: A Process View (WITHDRAWN)
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Author: Emmanouil Gkeredakis, Warwick Business School
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This paper explores theoretically a novel type of organization, which aims to recurrently innovate almost exclusively through the sustained contributions of crowds. We approach the emergence of this intriguing phenomenon, the ‘crowd-based organization’, from a process perspective. Our analysis focuses on the following questions: (1) How do communities at the heart of a crowd-based organization emerge? (2) How does crowd-based organizing – a recurrent pattern of convergent crowd contributions – become possible? (3) How does a crowd- based organization, despite its fluidity, acquire system-like characteristics? In our attempt to address these questions, we draw attention to value systems, in particular, conventions of worth. Our core argument is that the ‘unconventional’ (in terms of its aims and form) crowd- based organization comes about through the mobilization of taken-for- granted conventions of worth. Such conventions, we show, become highly useful and are used flexibly in processes of organizational emergence. The paper’s main contribution is to outline a model of the process dynamics, which constitute and continuously modify the crowd-based organization.
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Search Terms: crowdsourcing | online communities | organizational becoming
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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An Insterstitial Space for Social Innovation
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Author: Anne-Laure Fayard, New York U.
Author: Natalia Levina, New York U.
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In this paper, drawing on an ethnographic study of the OpenIDEO community, we examine how an organization, IDEO, created and cultivated a diverse and global community to collaboratively develop solutions on grand challenges such as health, education, aging, and safety. Through inductive analysis, we identify that to foster collaborative problem-solving for social impact, IDEO’s OpenIDEO team enacted three practices: temporal structuring, creating a collaborative community, and connecting participants and ideas. Drawing on the notion of interstitial space, we suggest that by enacting these practices the OpenIDEO team was able to create a community of passionate volunteers and the conditions for them to generate solutions to grand challenges. We also found that while the OpenIDEO community was successful at generating ideas, it was faced with difficulties in transforming them into social impact. We highlight two enabling conditions that were useful in helping the OpenIDEO team address these difficulties: community managers taking on the role of boundary spanners and embracing an experimental mindset. Our findings advance our understanding of how organizations can contribute to tackling grand challenges and how they might organize to foster collective action among a diverse group of passionate individuals. Our paper also participates to the new, but vibrant body of literature on open social innovation.
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Search Terms: grand challenges | social innovation | open social innovation
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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A Theoretical Perspective on Social Capital to Sustain Open Communities.
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Author: Federica Fusi, Arizona State U.
Author: Eric Welch, Arizona State U.
Author: Selim Louafi, CIRAD
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This paper develops a theoretical approach to explain how social capital – cognitive, relational and structural – affects long-term sustainability of open communities. Organization studies have shown that social capital provides critical resources that support sharing, participation and collaboration in organizations, networks and communities. But the contextual assumptions in that research are less relevant for open communities which have unique structures and composition – i.e. global scale, high heterogeneity of members, voluntary participation, and quasi-open access to resources. Drawing from observations of global genomic data and information centers, this article argues that sustainability of open communities such as global centers, depends heavily on the establishment and leveraging of cognitive social capital, while relational and structural social capital may be designed in to bound the community, manage homogeneity and increase trust among members. Open communities should be aware of such relationships if they want to ensure long-term sustainability of their project.
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Search Terms: Social capital | Open communities | Global Scientific Research Centers
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Building A Collaborative Community: An Agent-Based Simulation Study
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Author: Dorthe Doejbak Haakonsson, Aarhus U.
Author: Lars A. Bach, Aarhus School of Business and Social Sciences
Author: Charles C. Snow, Pennsylvania State U.
Author: Borge Obel, Aarhus U.
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A collaborative community is an emerging organizational form that is increasingly being used in knowledge-intensive environments where success depends on the ability to collaborate. We analyze how community member composition influences the development of a collaborative community with two kinds of members: problem providers and problem solvers. In an agent-based simulation study, we examine how the dynamics and survival of a collaborative community are affected by: (a) the initial number of agents of each kind and (b) the types and levels of skills agents possess. The simulation results show an early drop in the number of community members followed by continued growth in community size. Independent of the number of members of each kind at the formation of the community, the number of members of both kinds is approximately the same during the growth phase. The community’s growth rate depends on agent skills (both type and quality). The results suggest that homogeneous communities experience a small drop in the number of members during the early phase. Heterogeneous communities show a larger drop early on, but tend to converge to a higher average agent skill level than a homogeneous community. Sensitivity analyses demonstrate that the simulation results are consistently robust. Our use of the simulation method allows us to explain the behavior of a collaborative community over time, and we discuss the implications of our findings for building collaborative communities.
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Search Terms: Organizational Design | Computer Simulations | Collaborative Communities
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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