Causing Mass Collaboration - Summary

Summary

Master’s Thesis Causing Mass Collaboration Shaun Abrahamson Master of Business Administration Creative Leadership Class of 2008-2009

Editing Time

from: April 2008 until: July 2009

Causing Mass Collaboration

Shaun Abrahamson

What do leading organizations such as Google, Apple, Starbucks and P&G have in common? They are leaders in their respective industries in terms of market share, growth or product innovation. They also have something else in common – they are finding new ways to collaborate with people outside their organizations such as customers and partners. This apparent theme provided motivation for the following hypothesis: Organizations are able to create the most competitive products, services and communications when they find the right ways to engage their communities of customers and partners in specific tasks in their creative processes. To test this thesis, the research begins by analyzing what has been achieved using “Mass Collaboration“, contrasting these efforts with traditional processes. Then the technical, social and management trends that are fueling “Mass Collaboration” are discussed. To understand how organizations can engage their communities in the right way, leading practitioners are interviewed, case studies are reviewed and the author participates in and observes a number of Mass Collaboration efforts. From this research a number of critical factors without which, Mass Collaboration are unlikely to result in superior outcomes. These factors are organized into the OPTO framework. Finally, conclusions are discussed and recommendations are made for future work.

Background In 2006, Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, claimed that about 500 people were responsible for managing Wikipedia. Aaron Swartz surprised many – when he refuted this claim and observed that there was a much larger group contributing most of the new information to Wikipedia. While Wale’s 500 were making many edits, a much larger part of the community was adding most of the new information with just a few edits each – according to Wikipedia statistics, 158,065 have contributed the English version of Wikipedia. By comparison, the reference, prior to Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, has 4,411 named contributors. While Wikipedia relies on a community of more than 150,000 people, Google depends on an even larger community. “Google works because it relies on the

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millions of individuals posting websites to determine which other sites offer content of value...This technique actually improves as the web gets bigger, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted.” – Ten things Google has found to be true. The value created by Google search is in part, the result of people who do not work for Google. One might argue that these are isolated examples specific to new technology-based businesses, but mature industries are being transformed by the same idea. In 2009 Mass Collaboration is redefining the processes of creating and publishing news. New collaboration is happening between traditional news organizations and individual news gatherers on Twitter. More structured interaction is also happening such as Economist Debates or CNN iReport or Bild.de user submitted video or most recently The Guardian MP Expenses research project. Beyond the larger, more visible transformations in media and technology industries, Mass Collaboration is being used by consumer service and product companies to solicit new ideas and to gather feedback. Some examples include Starbuck’s MyStarbucksIdea; MUJI’s design community MUJI.net; P&G Connect & Develop to encourage sharing of ideas and solutions with those outside the P&G organization; Unilever Mindbubble community to co-create with women; Innocentive works on behalf of multiple organizations to connect them with people to help them solve their toughest R&D problems.

Changing Social and Technology Environment In 2005, Tim O’Reilly defined the term Web 2.0 identifying a new focus on how people interact with one another and their online tools to create new kinds of value. Since 2005 there has been an almost fourfold increase in time spent with email, communities and search, underscoring the importance of O’Reilly’s observation. People are creating and interacting in new ways, because new tools are being created to make these interactions possible. Forrester Research Social Technographics classifies types of interaction and participation levels, from those who create and share content such as video, im-

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ages or blogs to those who share comments and publicly review products (and those who don’t engage in any of these activities). While relatively a relatively small percent of the people creating things like videos or blogs, larger percentages of the online population are making smaller contributions, much like the links and edits that benefit Google and Wikipedia. Similar patterns can be observed across different countries, with younger generations adopting these new behaviors, fastest. As technology is enabling new forms of creation and participation, organizations are discovering new truths about their creative processes that point to the benefits of involving outsiders. For example Harvard Business School discussed the role of leadership in managing creativity and found that when Google tracked ideas with management support versus those that that were executed without support from above, the unsupported ideas outperformed the management supported ideas. Organizations like Innocentive are taking some of the hardest problems from companies like Eli Lilly and P&G and having people outside these organizations solve them. While many organizations are beginning to understand the surprising and useful impact of getting more ideas and feedback from outside their organization, they misunderstand how Mass Collaboration processes work. Technology is often the focus and they overlook the more complex issues of organizing the interactions such as selecting appropriate tasks, recruiting the right people and assuring alignment of interests between the community and the organization. To achieve the potential benefits of Mass Collaboration, organizations have to engage their communities in the right way. Technology can play a role, but it is not the whole solution.

Understanding how Mass Collaboration works Existing literature is reviewed to understand successful Mass Collaboration efforts in its many forms including open source software development, co-creation, open innovation, media spreading and Crowdsourcing. The author also participated in communities work with large established brands as well as successful communities associated with newer organizations including Wordpress, Buzzma-

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chine, Fluther, P&G, Lego, Twitter, Innocentive, Jovoto, Dell, Starbucks, Nokia Labs and Google, During initial research, a common leadership group was identified –“Community Organizers”. These people facilitate interactions between communities and organizations. They are often associated with younger organizations that rely more heavily on their communities. They are defining how organizations do Mass Collaboration because they are learning how best to interact with and get the most from communities with whom organizations wish to interact. Fourteen of these people were interviewed from communities which the author had studied, specifically to understand how successful Mass Collaboration efforts are organized and uncover common challenges. From this research, a framework was developed to determine if organizations are working with their communities in the best ways. The OPTO framework is used to evaluate the following core elements of Mass Collaboration: Outcomes – What has been achieved? How does the outcome compare to existing approaches? Is the creative process faster, more economical? Are the resulting ideas, products or communications better? Are there additional benefits or consequences beyond the desired outcome? What are good measures of successful outcomes? People – Why are people participating – money or socializing; reputation or “making meaning”? What is the level of participation? Is there positive sentiment? Who are the most active participants? Are they the best people for the required tasks? Are they contributing positively to the community beyond direct contributions to the outcome? Tools – Do people want to use the tools? Is the user experience minimizing the effort to complete tasks? Is content helping communications? Are tools making it easier to collaborate – are they invisible or do they feel invisible, because they are used to create a more playful experience? Do participants need to be aware of the tools?

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Organizing – Are the interests of the people in the community aligned with the interests of the organization? How do you recruit people? What are the rules of engagement and how do you maintain a safe, fun and productive environment? Can leadership happen from any direction? Does the community share ownership of critical tasks for the formal organization, such as recruiting, defining rules and guidelines or ensuring a healthy community environment? To demonstrate how the framework can be used, example evaluations are completed for Mass Collaboration efforts organized by Starbucks, Nokia Labs, Jovoto and Wordpress.

Conclusions Successful Mass Collaboration efforts have specific approaches to organizing, people and tools to achieve their outcomes. As a result, a framework can be used to evaluate and improve relative performance of Mass Collaboration efforts. When efforts evaluate poorly, they are unlikely to deliver improvements over an organizations internal creative processes. In some Mass Collaboration efforts, the community requires little support while providing significant value. In other cases more investment is required to recruit, motivate and organize communities and develop specialized tools for specific tasks. Therefore there will be cases where value created by the community, may not justify the investment in these community building efforts. In addition to economic resources, organizations have to become familiar with non-monetary currencies they can use to motivate and align interests with communities. These soft currencies include: “meaningful work“, “reputation enhancement“, “ego-boosting” or opportunities for “social interactions“. These currencies enable organizations to achieve economic value using non-economic assets. “Attention” is one of the most important resources particularly for unpaid community participants. Organizations can design smaller, simpler tasks, that require less explicit attention or obtain results from actions that users might be taking

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Causing Mass Collaboration

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anyway (requiring no attention). Like competitive employment markets, a competitive market for attention, is likely to emerge with the attendant increase in recruiting costs. In the best examples of Mass Collaboration, communities have significant equity – they are able to influence the organizations they work with and organizations demonstrate a willingness to be influenced. For example, while Apple approves all applications, the experience most people have with the iPhone is largely though the most popular applications developed by third parties. Similarly Starbucks has launched a number on the ideas selected by popular vote by their community. “A camel is a horse designed by a committee“. This is a common response to Mass Collaboration because it must suffer the same shortcomings of any committee decision-making process. Mass Collaboration processes do not rely on voting – while community organizers might strive for consensus, many decisions are also made by small groups or individuals. In our interview, Jeff Jarvis pointed out that “You win when you lose control“; however leadership is required to determine what control to share (or give up). Successful organizations figure out what tasks the community is good at and where communities need support. They are able to determine when leadership emerges from the community versus when leadership is required by the organization.

Recommendations Finally, Mass Collaboration should be applied to this work. To date, participation has been limited to 41 named contributors, including interviewees, people who have participated in conversations and those who have reviewed versions of the thesis documents. Ideally thousands of people will contribute to this framework. As Mass Collaboration efforts include more people, scale issues emerge. Firstly, efforts become more susceptible to “gaming” – that is, people trying to take advantage of the openness to achieve specific objectives or simply disrupting the

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process (often referred to at “trolls” or “griefers”). It is therefore useful to understand how Mass Collaboration efforts can best be secured. Secondly, as the number of participants grows, people are unable to maintain deep connections with an increasingly large group. It is therefore useful to understand strategies for decomposing communities to enable people to maintain relationships as communities grow, without losing the benefits of increasing scale. This work has focused on a particular set of outcomes, but many more organizations might benefit from Mass Collaboration. Non-profits and governments might achieve new outcomes - there is already some evidence that this is happening as President Obama extends his participation models from his election campaign into the administration. This work focused on business to consumer relationships, but business-to-business interaction might benefit in a similar way. Further research is required to understand how these types of organizations might use the proposed framework. Finally, one area that needs more investigation is ownership. Who should own the products, services or communications? It is not clear what relationship exists between ownership models and the type of participants they attract – for example, do open source projects attract better programmers because of the ownership model? Is P&G limited to certain types of community tasks and participants by its choice of intellectual property models? It would be useful to understand the relationship between ownership and the types and quality of community contributions. Since you have come this far, why not join us at http://www.colaboratorie.org?

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