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In this paper, we explore a network of distributed individuals’ collective efforts to establish an innovation ecology allowing them to engage in bottom up creative technological practices in today’s information society. Specifically, we present an empirical study of the technological practices in an emerging creative technology community – independent [indie] game developers in the United States. Based on indie game developers’ own accounts, we identified four themes that constitute an innovation ecology from the bottom up, including problem solving; collaborative information seeking, sharing, and reproducing; community support; and policy and politics. We argue that these findings inform our understanding of bottom up technological innovation and shed light on the design of sociotechnical systems to mediate and support such innovation beyond the gaming context.
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Capturing the Production of Innovative Ideas: An Online Social Network Experiment and “Idea Geography” Visualization
Collective design and innovation are crucial in organizations. To investigate how the collective design and innovation processes would be affected by the diversity of knowledge and background of collective individual members, we conducted three collaborative design task experiments which involved nearly 300 participants who worked together anonymously in a social network structure using a custom-made computer-mediated collaboration platform. We compared the idea generation activity among three different background distribution conditions (clustered, random, and dispersed) with the help of the “doc2vec” text representation machine learning algorithm. We also developed a new method called “Idea Geography” to visualize the idea utility terrain on a 2D problem domain. The results showed that groups with random background allocation tended to produce the best design idea with the highest utility values. It was also suggested that the diversity of participants’ backgrounds distribution on the network might interact with each other to affect the diversity of ideas generated. The proposed idea geography successfully visualized that the collective design processes did find the high utility area through exploration and exploitation in collaborative work.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734147
- PAR ID:
- 10301399
- Editor(s):
- Yang, Zining; von Briesen, Elizabeth
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference of The Computational Social Science Society of the Americas
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 341-354
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77517-9_20
