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

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”, our findings 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. Our 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 to counteract interfering tendencies that either prioritized content production, community building, or skill development respectively. These findings enhance our conceptual understanding of the reinforcing structures needed to foster moments of collaborative innovation in an online context. We conclude that firms seeking to tap into online communities’ innovative potential need to appreciate community and skill development as innovative processes that have to be actively incentivized to keep them in sync with content production