Revisiting Large-Scale Disruptive Collaboration in the Age of Social Media

1. Revisiting Large-Scale Disruptive Collaboration in the Age of Social Media Azad M. Madni Ann Majchrzak Viterbi School of Engineering Marshall School of Business University of Southern California University of Southern California 2013 CSSE Annual Research Review University of Southern California March 14, 2013

2. Outline • Disruptive Collaboration • Impact of Social Media • Transdisciplinary Collaboration • Complexity-Driven Tradeoffs • Provocative Conclusions

3. Large-Scale Disruptive Collaboration • Occurs when a large number of people work together to develop new ideas that change business models, sources of revenues, product trajectories, and technology roadmaps. • Invariably implies “paradigm shifts” • cloud computing: from in-house IT infrastructure to “purchase by the yard” • agile development using SaaS: from in-house SW development to outside SaaS capabilities leverage (buy SW, in-house crew provide “glue”) • Need more of it!

4. Social Media Proliferation Affecting Nature of Collaboration • Twitter • LinkedIn/Facebook-like Social Media • Chatter • Skype Screenshare / GotoMeeting • Kickstarter • MetadataTagging/pinning

5. Virtual/Hybrid? Completely Virtual Entirely Hybrid Person Next Door

6. Multiple Collaboration Platforms

7. Traditional Teams No Longer Idea Sources • Crowdsourcing • information acquisition • e.g., Goldcorp (find gold deposits by making property info public) • Open Innovation / Expert Sourcing • Idea generation and evolution • attributed to Chesbrough, UC Berkeley • no longer develop ideas in-house; • develop ideas collaboratively with “strangers” • e.g., buy / license inventions and processes • e.g., expose own inventions through licensing, spin-offs • e.g., InnoCentive (global web community for open innovation)

8. Social Media Provides More Opportunities for Transdisciplinary Collaboration Research Types Comparison Factors adapted from Madni, A.M. “Transdisciplinarity: Reaching beyond Disciplines to Find Connections,” Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science, Vol. 11, No. 1, March 2007, pp. 1-11.

9. Features of Transdisciplinary Collaboration • Goalis towork together to generate and evolve ideas and find creative solutions that transcend disciplinary boundaries • Participants come together from the very start to communicate and exchange ideas • Participants contribute their knowledge and expertise, but approaches and solutions are determined collectively • Participants DO NOT develop their own answers to a problem before collaboration

10. Energizing TransdisciplinaryCollaboration • Ask Questions that cut across Disciplinary Boundaries • Encourage “ fluidity” and “serendipity” • Make assumptions explicit to overcome apparent differences • Set constraints aside to foster creative option generation • Actively reach out to other disciplines to make connections • Introduce a new metaphor, change level of abstraction, share a picture or graphic to enhance sense-making • Focus on Idea / Problem / Goal, not Disciplinary Expertise • Multi-layered governance

11. Summary • Large-Scale Disruptive Collaboration is: • Ubiquitous • Multi-layered • Complex combinations of formal and informal networks • Ad hoc and Unbounded, as well as Stable and Bounded • Mix of volunteerism and responsibility • Mix of creativity and execution

12. New forms of Disruptive Collaboration require managing Trade-offs/Tensions • Trade-off #1: Privacy vs Transparency • Trade-off #2: Squandering vs Withholding Resources • Trade-off #3: Risk Increase vs Decrease by Going Virtual • Trade-off #4: Governance vs Chaos in Collective Creativity • Trade-off #5: Stable leadership vs Temps in Governance • Trade-off #6: Platform Design vs Need for Adaptability

13. Privacy vs Transparency • Compromise between transparency and privacy • Key considerations include trust, familiarity, need for disclosure • e.g., how do you determine average salary or age of a group without explicitly having group members provide their salaries or ages? This can be done by using secure multi-party computation approach

14. Squandering vs Withholding Resources • Need to avoid resource imbalance • Resources are not just monetary • They include attention, willingness, information validation time • Throwing more resources at a bad idea or extraneous activity is just as bad as providing inadequate resources for a good idea or needed activity Focus should be on what resources it takes to evolve a good idea

15. Risk Increase vs Decrease by Going Virtual • Virtual collaboration reduces some risks while increasing others • People come together to innovate and collectively lower risk • Individuals can also “shut down” when they have to perform in front of others in the virtual environment • Collaboratively innovating is risky for some people Potential solutions include anonymity in specific contexts, assignment of different roles to collaborators

16. Risks

17. Governance vs Chaos in Collective Creativity • Need to control flexibility while encouraging creativity • This is a very real tension in collaboration and VOs Focus on targeted, affordable flexibility

18. Layers of Participation * “Refactoring is the process of rewriting written material to improve its readability or structure, with the explicit purpose of keeping its meaning or behavior.”

19. Stable Leadership vs Temporary Governance • Context determines how this tradeoff is made • Concept of leadership role is key • Need a fluid way to go from stable core leadership to organicvolunteers temporarily performing in governance roles Disaggregate leadership roles; allocate leadership characteristics to these roles; assign agents with specific leadership characteristics to these roles; increase flexibility

20. Platform Design vs Need for Adaptability • Platform standardizes development and reduces development risks • An over-specified platform will suffer from a lack of evolvability and may have to be discarded • Finding the “sweet spot” is a challenge and a high payoff research problem Incorporate real options in platform design to exploit potential breakthroughs w/o increasing development risks

21. Product Platform Generation and Evolution

22. Provocative Conclusions • Focus on idea generation and evolution enabled by technology, people and organizations, not view each factor in isolation • Adopt ideas as the unit of analysis, not exclusively focus on resolution of conflicts among collaborators • Exploit context to rapidly evolve ideas, not impose constraints to prematurely prune them • Focus on collaboration behavior, not virtual organization structure • View organizations as organisms with attributes (e.g., people, culture, motivation) that can be exploited, not as a constraining function • Focus on maintaining requisite variety over time, not just “success”

23. References • Madni, A.M. “Transdisciplinarity: Reaching Beyond Disciplines to Find Connections,” Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science, Vol. 11, No. 1, March 2007, pp. 1-11. • Majchrzak, A., More, P.H. B., Faraj, S. Transcending Knowledge Differences in Cross-Functional Teams, Organization Science, July/August 2012, vol. 23, no. 4, 951-970

24. Thank You!