CAREER: Generating Generativity: Modeling and Fostering Creative Collaborations in Enterprise Social Media Using a Cyberinfrastructure for Smart Innovation (CSI)

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This project aims to develop predictive models of the multi-level drivers, processes and sociotechnical practices of effective collaborations based in Enterprise Social Media (ESM), leveraging the unparalleled amounts of archival data stored in them. The recent proliferation of ESM promises to create better opportunities for generative collaborations, yet organizations struggle to establish fully active systems and reap the promised benefits. Following the paradigm of persuasive system design, this project aims to build and evaluate a feedback system, the Cyberinfrastructure for Smart Innovation (CSI). The CSI extracts near real-time data from groups inside the ESM, visualizes their social dynamics and activities, and suggests actions beneficial to their generativity. Research will be carried out in three phases: Phase 1: Create a fundamental understanding and predictive models of distinct forms of generative collaborations and their effectiveness through the algorithmic curation and statistical analysis of six years of ESM archival data from the partner organization, Steelcase Inc.; Phase 2: Develop a suite of design guidelines for the CSI using formative and summative user-centered research methods; Phase 3: Evaluate the causal impact of the CSI on generative collaborations, through quasi-experiments within real-world innovation teams at Steelcase and self-reported evaluations with a sample of its client organizations. Enterprise Social Media represent an essential research context given the innumerable anecdotal claims about the merits of ESM for generativity, but there is a pronounced lack of scientific research validating such claims and explaining when and how these merits occur. This research project aims to make five major intellectual contributions: (1) Improved understanding of the multilevel antecedents of generative collaborations in ESM; (2) Expansion of existing organization science literatures by providing unobtrusive, mixed-method, and sociotechnical insights into processes of generative collaborations; (3) Extension of extant ESM research on the actual impact of these systems; (4) Production of the proposed persuasive feedback system (CSI) intended to foster improved ESM-based generative collaborations; (5) Rigorous empirical testing of the causal effect of the CSI on generativity in real-world groups. An integrated education and research program will include a new research seminar where students will work to adapt the CSI for improving the effectiveness of group work in problem-based learning settings, thereby creating a second, non-industry testbed for the CSI and enabling the discovery of fundamental theoretical principles that abstract from generative collaboration to learning contexts.