User contributions, crowdsourcing, and ecosystem development are some of
the several labels for external collaboration.
The connected world of industries and individuals have taken the
platforms to become hubs of communities where producers and consumers interact
more than ever before jointly creating new business models of collaboration. These consumer platforms operate with their
foundations closer to social communities of customers whether they are public,
industry specific, or a business created. These communities organized as
platforms are setting the stage for new ways of designing interactive customer
experiences in scenarios with behavioral complexity and relational control. In
this article, the terms ecosystems and platforms are interchangeable although
ecosystems encompass platforms.
External collaboration is getting more sophisticated leading and
following the customer (s) with technologies. Technologies are in place at
every touchpoint of the journey following him/ her as a part of the system of
life experiences. Ongoing, innovative, and experimental endeavors to fine tune
the experience is expected to bring value with a higher impact on the
interactions. The effort requires in depth understanding of the context,
personal preferences, coming into play to provide a unique, unified, adaptive,
proactive support system to the customer. The customer’s positive and negative
feedback trail has much to offer for making these systems even more impactful.
In the
last decade and a half, the information age has emphasized migration of an
array of back- end, robust information systems to web based, global systems.
The quest for utilizing the internet’s strength as a larger ecosystem embedded
by systems of platforms is taking shape in the business world. Business models are harnessed to lure the new
age global customer with experiences that are deeper in meaning, nurturing
behaviors with every device that can augment human empathy.
Speaking
of deeper and meaningful collaboration, Pink (2006)
called this phenomenon attributing it to the dawn of “conceptual age.” He
defines the conceptual age as “animated by a different form of thinking” with
aptitudes of “high concept” and “high touch.” He further clarifies that high
concept “involves the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create
artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine
seemingly unrelated ideas into something new. High touch involves the ability
to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to
find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the
quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning ”(pp.
51-52).
The
current trends in producer
consumer interaction platforms are fundamentally different from the business
models witnessed in the various stages of internet evolution so far. They
combine the strength of internet as a platform along with the applications of
the conceptual age as defined by Pink (2006).
Starbucks,
Nike, and Coursera, adhere to a few principles of collaboration in ways of
teaming and aligning, fostering participatory networks for building and
sustaining their ecosystems. They all have one thing in common – their founders
and leaders had a grand vision for everything they took on – the mission
statement and their guiding principles. Outwardly, Starbucks is a coffee shop,
Nike is a sportswear and apparel company, Coursera.org is a learning
organization where anyone can learn from a professor from a world class school.
Starbucks’
mission statement includes words like “premium purveyor of finest coffee in the
world.” The fans are in millions. It is meeting the needs by interacting with
its fans on their ideas generated and leveraged at MyStarbucksIdea.com. What is
more interesting is to analyze how they address the collaboration challenges
for filtering breakthrough ideas from the millions of ideas. At http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/, there is
a whole world of ideas happening here on a product, experience, and involvement.
There is a voting system for deciding on what is next at Starbucks listening to
the fans.
Nike’s
mission statement says – “bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in
the world” followed by the definition of an “athlete” (if you have a body, you
are an athlete). Nike is an orchestrator of the estimated 98% of its production
in Asian countries with diverse suppliers and products. Nike always focuses on
its core competency and strengths around the athlete and its product design and
R&D. The ecosystem reveals this. At http://www.nikefuellab.com/ Nike
demonstrates its collaborative initiatives with the athletes with a “common
language for movement” focusing on technologies and applications for measuring
activity.
Coursera’s
app store model for choosing courses on the website lives up to its mission – “provide
universal access to the world’s best education.” Thousands of students gather
and openly collaborate with faculty and facilitators from reputed institutions
of the world in MOOCs settings. Together they are enhancing the learning experience
for students worldwide.
Several
models of external collaboration have taken shape in the always changing,
rapidly innovating software industry. One of the most prominent models is the Open
Source community model. The open source community continues to
challenge the proprietary initiatives in the software industry. Linux operating
system, adopted worldwide at a large scale on computer systems is the starting
of the dominant cases of the marvels and miracles achieved by open source
community. In 1991, thousands of volunteer software developers collaborated
with a student, Linus Torvalds. He placed his software modules open for anyone
willing to contribute and develop code under the GNU General public license.
There is no stopping to this movement since then. The history of the evolution
of the open source community model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_development) and
several other team collaborations adopting various software development techniques
are beyond the scope of this article. It
is enough to say that open collaboration and knowledge sharing has been the
backbone of the meteoric rise of the software industry. Today, at the Top Coder
(topcoder.com), more than a million coders around the world come together for
similar crowdsourcing initiatives. Google’s mobile phone operating system
Android (based on Linux kernel) is yet another case of open source initiative
by Google.
General Electric’s
(GE) innovations in their core business are continuous since sixty or more
years. There is a constant effort of scouting for external research and
development in spite of it’s established idea generation factories and research
labs globally. GE sponsors and collaborates research endeavors with universities
and national labs for envisioning new fields of investment to maintain its
leadership position in its core business.
GE recognizes that not only following new principles, discovering them
is also crucial to compete as a leader.
The grand
challenges such as the one for Netflix to
improve the movie recommendation algorithm is an example of crowdsourcing and
team diversity and unorganized groups concepts. Every college student or a
professional is aware of the concepts of team collaboration. However, the
granularity of detail of the contributing factors is key to understanding success
stories of team collaboration in various settings. It is not just talent, but
also the emotional intelligence and agility of the groups of people working on
innovative projects impact the results. Bringing together the best of people
talent is not enough, combining their work in ways that only a group can
achieve is the triumph of collaborative work. The individual does not lose,
instead, shines with the spirit of the aligned group in such settings.
Managing
trust and risks are inherent to any collaborative activity. When external
resources are involved, the employee and outside collaborator have similar as
well as different governance structures in an organization. While every
organization has a window to the outside world with a website, has policies for
public relations, and sales, initiatives for the external or open collaboration
activities are different. The impact of an external collaborator on the
innovative processes of the internal organization requires focus and attention
to strategies for managing and developing the ecosystems.
Several
known risks exist in external collaboration activities. Kannangara, S.
N., & Uguccioni, P. (2013) identify at least eight types of dominant risks in the
existing business ecosystem literature covering basics such as actors’
interdependence or complexities that are unique to collaboration when no one
takes responsibility leading to uncertainty in results.
Any
collaborative initiative presents dilemmas requiring thoughtful action. An
understanding of game theory principles and prisoner’s
dilemma in particular help with determining possible paths of action for
predictive outcomes even in complex scenarios at large scale. Business
communities present complex dilemmas to the stakeholders. When the stakeholders
are in large numbers, the network effects can be very high with highly
interactive and dynamic scenarios, causing negative ripple effects for everyone
involved. A carefully designed governance structure can avoid such effects. Game
theories such as the Prisoner’s dilemma theory can be used in scenarios of
collaboration, price wars and catch 22
situations as instances of prisoner’s dilemma in platform business. This concept of the game, when extended to n
players, results in thousands of experiments with scenarios for collective
action and behaviors. For example, an understanding of the basis for the
pricing wars that give rise to foundations for inter and internal firm
partnerships for cooperation as well as rivalry requires experiments and
simulations to help envision outcomes and prepare with measures of success
mitigating risks. Architectures of
participation involving stakeholders to connect, contribute, collaborate, and
co-create are coming to shape the open organization where the network does most
of the work. Cook, S. (2008) discusses “user contribution taxonomy”
where both active and passive users contribute, whether it is providing
expertise as in building Wikipedia encyclopedia, creativity via YouTube video
sharing sites or provide behavioral data as in the case of Amazon
recommendation systems. Removing barriers and obstacles is the first step in an
organization to become more participatory.
Interest
graphs bring relevance and context to handle information overload caused in
such networks. The interest graph of the individual helps learn about his/ her
activities beyond the realms of Facebook and Twitter. Machine learning or data
mining algorithms accomplish this now for networked organizations for content
curation. Several of the consumer collaboration trends suggest how the
seemingly disparate ideas are filling the gaps people need the most.
Competition, return on investment, making up the numbers of profitability can
take the firms only so far. Although it appears that the challenges of
collaboration on a large scale are designing for loss of control and handle the
overload of information, the organization can prepare and reap the benefits. Companies can explore the feasibility by
systematically analyzing of why crowdsourcing is useful and resolves their
problem at hand, what they can crowdsource, and how they can approach the
initiative.
References:
Kannangara, S. N., & Uguccioni, P. (2013). Risk
Management in Crowdsourcing-Based Business Ecosystems. Technology Innovation Management Review, 32-38.
Cook, S. (2008). THE CONTRIBUTION REVOLUTION. (cover
story). Harvard Business Review, 86(10), 60-69.
Pink, D. H. (2006). A whole new mind. New
York, New York : Penguin Group.
Idelchik, M., & Kogan, S. (2012). GE's Open
Collaboration Model. Research Technology Management, 55(4), 28-31. doi:10.5437/08956308X5504101
