Hurdles ahead

While distributed cocreation does seem promising, it isn’t entirely clear what capabilities companies will need (or how they will organize those capabilities) to make the most of it. Many of the answers will become clear as companies gain greater experience with various open-innovation approaches, including distributed cocreation. But a few challenges are already apparent.

Attracting and motivating cocreators

Since companies must provide the right incentives to the right participants, they should understand what talented contributors find valuable about interacting with a community. Financial incentives may be necessary in some instances, but other participants can be inspired to cocreate by mechanisms like community recognition. Companies will also have to spot hurdles to participation—such as the ease or difficulty of contributing and the time needed to do so—and take steps to minimize any problems. In addition, they may need to implement well-structured paths to coax participants to move from lower to higher levels of participation. Wikipedia, for instance, now has 500 participating administrators who have earned special privileges to prevent edits on certain articles, usually to stop vandals who have targeted them.

Structuring problems for participation

To make it possible for many contributors to participate effectively in a cocreation community, problems should be broken down to let contributors work in parallel on different pieces. Otherwise, it will be impossible for a critical mass of participants to cocreate effectively. A global team of more than 2,000 scientists, for example, participated in the design of the ATLAS particle detector, a complex scientific instrument that will be used to detect and measure subatomic particles in high-energy physics. The effort was disaggregated into many different components and distributed across 165 working groups, which used Internet-based tools to help coordinate the work.³

Governance mechanisms to facilitate cocreation

Communities are productive when they have clear rules, clear leadership, and transparent processes for setting goals and resolving conflicts among members. Sun Microsystems, for instance, developed its Solaris operating system, cocreated with a global community of software developers, in the early 1990s. The company established a board, including two Sun employees and a third member from the larger software community, charged with loosely overseeing the project’s progress. Even then, by the way, the community wanted Sun to relinquish more control.

The leadership must also maintain a cohesive vision, since there is always a risk that community members will “fork” intellectual property and use it to develop their own cocreated product or service. Mozilla, the online application suite distributed by the Mozilla Foundation, was cocreated by a software community.⁴ As the programs were being developed, two contributing engineers, dissatisfied with the project’s direction, used the Mozilla code to create the Firefox Web browser. Community leaders eventually made it the primary supported browser.

Maintaining quality

Many cocreating online communities assume that “crowds”⁵ know more than individuals do and can therefore create better products; as the open-source-software expert Eric S. Raymond has said, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”⁶ It is far too early to know with certainty if this idea holds true across all kinds of products, but a growing consensus maintains that in software development, at least, distributed cocreation is a ticket to quality. A study published in the European Journal of Information Systems in 2000, for instance, noted that “open-source software often attains quality that outperforms commercial proprietary” approaches.⁷ What’s more, a December 2005 study published in the scientific journal Nature concluded that Wikipedia’s entries on scientific subjects were generally as accurate as those in the Encyclopædia Britannica.⁸ Still, some have questioned these conclusions and the accuracy or insights of the entries on which they were based.

A number of cocreated products have crossed a quality threshold to become widely adopted. A survey by Netcraft, an Internet research firm, showed that the cocreated open-source Web-server program Apache runs more than half of all Web sites and that eight of the ten most reliable Internet hosting companies run Linux. While the general thesis that cocreated products are higher in quality is difficult to prove, companies are increasingly willing to rely on them for mission-critical business processes.

[Next month, part three will include lessons learned and discuss cocreation through evolution.]

Notes:

³ We researched the design project in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute. For more information, see Philipp Tuertscher, “The ATLAS Collaboration: A Distributed Problem-Solving Network in Big Science,” http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk, 2007.

⁴ See Lenny T. Mendonca and Robert Sutton, “Succeeding at open-source innovation: An interview with Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker,” mckinseyquarterly.com, January 2008.

⁵ See Renée Dye, “The promise of prediction markets: A roundtable,” mckinseyquarterly.com, April 2008.

⁶ Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 1999.

⁷ Jan Ljungberg, “Open source movements as a model for organising,” European Journal of Information Systems, 2000, Volume 9, Number 4, pp. 208–16.

⁸ Jim Giles, “Internet encyclopaedias go head to head,” Nature, 2005, Volume 438, Number 7070, pp. 900–1.