CHS: Small: Blending the Virtual and the Physical: Understanding and Designing Crowd-Based Open Innovation Systems for Physical Products

公司经常求助于外部贡献者来执行重要功能，包括“开放式创新”场景，在这种场景中，公司创造挑战或竞争，让外部人群开发和提交创造性的想法。该项目将研究围绕复杂物理产品的基于人群的开放式创新的一些开放式问题，这些问题带来的挑战超越了之前研究过的开放式创新的软件和简单设计环境。这些包括(1)外部贡献者如何成功地将他们的贡献与他们不属于的组织结合起来，并为他们不容易访问的物理环境提出设计建议？(2)对于假设、流程和工具可能完全不同的外部贡献者，内部员工如何获取、导入和适应他们的投入？(3)如何设计系统和实践来促进外部贡献者的创造性工作并有效地融入公司流程？为了解决这些问题，项目团队将与一家使用先进工程技术开发和制造新车的公司密切合作，观察该公司和相关的众工社区在几项创新挑战中的表现。他们还将为一门以未来工作为中心的本科课程开发关于开放式创新的材料，这门课程既教授工作的发现，又让学生获得开发一个项目的实践经验，该项目将创造性的人群投入到小组工作中。该团队将为每个挑战收集多个数据源。从众筹平台本身，他们将收集所有在线讨论，从挑战开始到选择获胜的想法，由众筹和公司对这些想法进行评估，以及围绕开发获胜设计的后续技术工作。他们还将与在线社区成员进行访谈，试图了解为什么合作形成和解散，为什么有些设计最终没有提交给比赛，社区成员如何看待反馈，以及获胜者和非获胜者如何与获奖设计互动。同时，他们将观察和采访合作伙伴公司的活动，参加与正在研究的挑战相关的具体会议和每周例会（概述挑战本身之外的相关讨论和决策）。大部分分析将涉及应用社交网络和开放编码技术来跟踪公司内外参与者之间的交互模式和知识流动，并观察这些在挑战过程中如何演变。这些，以及对访谈和观察数据的基于理论的分析，将突出关键的规则模式（例如非文本工件的表示和操作）和重要的空白（例如需要提供适当但不敏感或麻痹的上下文水平），这些可能受益于更好的工具支持。

Firms often turn to external contributors to perform vital functions, including "open innovation" scenarios in which firms create challenges or competitions where external crowd workers develop and submit creative ideas. This project will study a number of open questions around crowd-based open innovation around complex physical products, which pose challenges above and beyond the software and simple design contexts in which open innovation has been studied before. These include (1) How do external contributors successfully align their contribution to an organization of which they are not a part and propose designs for a physical context to which they do not have easy access? (2) How do internal employees source, import, and adapt the inputs of external contributors whose assumptions, processes and tools might be entirely different? (3) How can systems and practices be designed to facilitate creative work from external contributors and effective integration into the the firm's processes? To address these questions the project team will work closely with a firm that uses advanced engineering technologies to develop and manufacture new vehicles, observing the firm and related crowdworker communities during several innovation challenges. They will also develop material on open innovation for an undergraduate course centered the future of work that both teaches findings from the work and gives students hands-on experience developing a project that incorporates creative crowd input into the group's work.The team will collect a number of sources of data for each challenge. From the crowd platform itself, they will collect all of the online discussions from the inception of the challenge to the choice of winning ideas, evaluation of those ideas by both the crowd and the firm, and the subsequent technical work around developing the winning designs. They will also conduct interviews with online community members, seeking to understand why collaborations form and disband, why some designs are not ultimately submitted to the competition, how community members perceive feedback, and how both winners and non-winners engage with the winning designs. In parallel, they will observe and interview activity at their partner firm, attending both specific meetings related to the challenges being studied and general weekly meetings (to give an overview of relevant discussions and decisions outside of the challenge itself). Much of the analysis will involve applying social network and open coding techniques to track interaction patterns and knowledge flows between actors both inside and outside the firm, looking at how these evolve through the course of the challenge. These, along with grounded theory-based analysis of interviews and observational data, will highlight both key regular patterns (such as the representation and manipulation of non-textual artifacts) and important gaps (such as the need to provide an appropriate but not sensitive or paralyzing level of context) that might benefit from better tool support.