Social Platforms for Supporting Value-cocreation and Innovation in Software Development and Industry-Academic Collaborations

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Understanding how to organize people to make effective decisions and carry them out is the single biggest challenge of our time; until we can address the problem of coordinating individuals to work together on solutions, we cannot tackle the world's most important issues. Service science offers a way for us to study people and their coordinated activities. A unique tenet of service science is the notion of value cocreation in which (at least) two entities interact to create value together. Successful value cocreating interactions require innovative uses of technology such as social platforms to support relationship building, group interactions, knowledge sharing, knowledge creation, and innovation. Understanding how to use social platforms to support value-cocreating interactions requires techniques for analyzing those interactions and the contexts in which they take place. In this research program, we will develop novel techniques for studying study service system interactions and create innovative social platforms. Specifically, we will: a) develop new methods and tools that analyze trace data in order to extract patterns of how technology mediates and supports interactions that result in value cocreation and innovation in service systems; and b) design, prototype, and evaluate new social platforms and new social features within existing platforms to increase value cocreation and innovation. Building on our expertise and recent research, we are focusing on two service-system contexts: open-source software development teams and industry / academic collaborative research teams. In both cases, (i) individual actors work independently across organizational and geographic boundaries but must communicate and interact to coordinate the cocreation of tangible outcomes; (ii) individual contributions to the outcomes are made explicit through attribution (e.g., as code contributors or co-authors); (iii) technological platforms are used to varying degrees to support communication, interaction, and work coordination; (iv) there exists trace data available about interactions (e.g., code comments, @mentions, co-authorship, joint funding) and outcomes (e.g., software product popularity measures, paper citations, numbers of patents) that can be analyzed. Furthermore, in both cases, a gender gap exists in participation and engagement. Ultimate outcomes of the research program will be new techniques to study innovation and value cocreation on social platforms that will be designed and evaluated at scale. Our novel social platforms and features as well as theories and systematic approaches will influence the ways in which researchers and practitioners structure projects and establish practices and policies for social interaction that support innovation.