Cooperation patterns of members in networks during co-creation

Abstract

Cooperation (i.e., co-creation) has become the principal way of carrying out creative activities in modern society. In co-creation, different participants can play two completely different roles based on two different behaviours: some participants are the originators who generate initial contents, while others are the revisors who provide revisions or coordination. In this study, we investigated different participants’ roles (i.e., the originator vs. the revisor) in co-creation and how these roles affected the final cooperation-group outcome. By using cooperation networks to represent cooperative relationships among participants, we found that peripheral members (i.e., those in the periphery of the cooperation networks) and core members (i.e., those in the centre of the cooperation networks) played the roles of originators and revisors, respectively, mainly affecting the quantity versus the quality of their creative outcomes. These results were robust across the three different datasets and the three different indicators defining core and peripheral members. Previous studies have considered cooperation behaviours to be homogeneous, ignoring that different participants may play different roles in co-creation. This study discusses patterns of cooperation among participants based on a model in which different roles in co-creation are considered. Thus, this research advances the understanding of how co-creation occurs in networks.