Choreographing Knowledge Collaboration: Embracing Fluidity in Nurturing an Online Community

Abstract

With online communities being increasingly viewed as potential sources of innovation, organizations are exploring possibly partnerships with them, particularly in the context of crowdsourcing for innovation. Yet organizations are often faced with challenges when collaborating with such communities because of their fluid nature. Indeed, participants, norms, foci, and interactions are ever- changing but the community stays the same overall. This essential fluidity generates knowledge collaboration and so should be maintained rather than controlled by organizations that partner with or build an online community. Based on a longitudinal case study of an open innovation platform for social innovation, we explore how an organization can choreograph knowledge collaboration in an online community it created while maintaining the fluidity that not only defines online communities, but which is central to their ability to afford collaboration. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s language-game concept, we analyze the dynamics of the interactions within the community over time and provide a rich description of how knowledge collaboration can be choreographed in a fluid online community through the embrace of fluidity as a constant. In particular, we show how the organization achieved this goal by designing a very simple language game to support collaboration in the community and by fully embracing fluidity to choreograph the collaboration over time.