Crowd Dynamics, Co-Creation, and Values in Technology Innovation: A Case Study in Robotics

• In Event: Scaling Up Co-creation? The Politics of Participatory Innovation Instruments

Abstract

In this article I am going to analyze crowd dynamics in co-creation settings (Cordella, Paletti, & Maha, 2018; Ramaswamy & Ozcan, 2018; Viscusi & Tucci, 2018). Furthermore, I am going to investigate the connection between these dynamics and the values informing or rather forming the outputs of co-creation initiatives, with a specific focus on technology innovation (Shilton, 2013; Snyder, Shilton, & Anderson, 2016; Stirling, 2007). On the one hand, the research aims to provide an understanding of how crowd dynamics eventually shape collective co-creation activities, either enabling or bounding their capacity of scaling; on the other hand, the different dimensions and perspectives on values are questioned in their difference through the shapes that co-creation practices may assume once moving from, e.g., value intensive setting of local groups and communities to a population assuming the dimension of anonymous crowd in co-creation practices characterized by seriality (Sartre, 1960; Viscusi & Tucci, 2018; Young, 1994). The theoretical arguments will be developed empirically through the analysis of the case study of a Robotics Innovation Facility (RIF) based in Italy, one of the initiatives funded by the European project ECHORD++ to provide access to businesses as well as a general audience to high-tech robotic equipment and expertise, thus eventually promoting and enabling co-creation in robotics.

References

Cordella, A., Paletti, A., & Maha, S. 2018. Renegotiating Public Value with Co-Production. In C. Tucci, A. Afuah, & G. Viscusi (Eds.), Creating and Capturing Value through Crowdsourcing: 181–203. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press.
Ramaswamy, V., & Ozcan, K. 2018. What is co-creation? An interactional creation framework and its implications for value creation. Journal of Business Research, 84: 196–205.
Sartre, J.-P. 1960. Critique de la Raison Dialectique. France: Éditions Gallimard.
Shilton, K. 2013. Values levers: Building ethics into design. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 38(3): 374–397.
Snyder, J., Shilton, K., & Anderson, S. 2016. Observing the materiality of values in information systems research. 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 2017–2026. IEEE.
Stirling, A. 2007. “Opening Up” and “Closing Down”: Power, Participation, and Pluralism in the Social Appraisal of Technology. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 33(2): 262–294.
Viscusi, G., & Tucci, C. 2018. Three’s a Crowd? In C. Tucci, A. Afuah, & G. Viscusi (Eds.), Creating and Capturing Value through Crowdsourcing. Oxford University Press.
Young, I. M. 1994. Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 19(3): 713–738.

Author

• Gianluigi Viscusi, EPFL