Collaborative Innovation Online: Entanglements of the Making of Content, Skills, and Community on a Songwriting Platform

293 CHAPTER 12 COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION ONLINE: ENTANGLEMENTS OF THE MAKING OF CONTENT, SKILLS, AND COMMUNITY ON A SONGWRITING PLATFORM Benjamin Schiemer, Elke Schüßler and Gernot Grabher ABSTRACT This chapter advances our understanding of collaborative innovation processes that span across organizational boundaries by providing an ethnographic account of idea generation dynamics in a member-initiated online songwriting community. Applying a science and technology studies perspective on processes “in the making,” the findings of this chapter reveal the generative entanglements of three processes of content-in-the-making, skill-in-the-making, and community-in-the-making that were triggered and maintained over time by temporary stabilizations of provisional, interim outcomes. These findings also elucidate interferences between these three processes, particularly when an increased focus on songs as products undermines the ongoing collaborative production of ideas. Regular interventions in the community design were necessary to simultaneously stimulate the three processes and counteract interfering tendencies that either prioritized content production, community building, or Managing Inter-organizational Collaborations: Process Views Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 64, 293–316 © 2019 by Benjamin Schiemer, Elke Schüßler, Gernot Grabher. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This chapter is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this chapter (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X20190000064018 294 BENJAMIN SCHIEMER ET AL. skill development, respectively. The authors conclude that firms seeking to tap into online communities’ innovative potential need to appreciate community and skill development as creative processes in their own right that have to be fostered and kept in sync with content production. Keywords: Collaborative innovation; innovation as process; online communities; creative content production; music industry; digitization INTRODUCTION The shift from “closed” to “open” forms of innovation in the 1990s (Chesbrough, 2003; Felin & Zenger, 2014) was preceded by various forms of inter-organizational innovation networks. Strategic alliances and joint ventures, for example, were forged by firms and their competitors, suppliers, and research partners in the 1980s to mobilize knowledge and financial resources as well as to share the risks of innovation processes (Dhanaraj & Parkhe, 2006; Sydow, Schüßler, & MüllerSeitz, 2016). Rather than internal resources located in the R&D department, external networks of firms evolved into the central “locus of innovation” (Powell, Koput, & Smith-Doerr, 1996). With the proliferation of digital technologies, innovation processes increasingly extended from closed businessto-business relationships toward a broad spectrum of interactions between businesses and globally dispersed user and consumer communities. To tap into the proverbial “wisdom of crowds” (Surowiecki, 2004), firms launched online communities (cf. von Hippel, 1976, 1978) to develop products and services jointly with users and consumers (e.g., Ansari & Munir, 2010; Grabher & Ibert, 2018; Parmentier & Mangematin, 2014). At the same time, self-organized communities began to produce non-proprietary knowledge independent of firms in areas as diverse as software development, rare disease treatments, or the production of cultural content (Benkler, 2006; Grabher & Ibert, 2013). From an interorganizational network perspective, these different forms of online collaborative production afford potentials to harness resources that are inaccessible through corporate forms of production. As a result, innovation processes today unfold in complex ecologies of relationships among firms, online and offline communities, and digital platforms (e.g., Boczkowski, Matassi, & Eugenia Mitchelstein, 2018; Grabher, Melchior, Schiemer, Schüßler, & Sydow, 2018). Innovation in the automotive industry, for instance, involves not only strategic alliances among competing original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), but also cross-industry alliances involving developers of autonomous driving technologies, ride-hailing and open-source mapping platforms, as well as user communities. Recent research has significantly expanded our knowledge of the various types of online communities and the modes of firm-community relations (Dahlander & Magnusson, 2005; Jeppesen & Frederiksen, 2006; O’Mahony & Bechky, 2008; Porter, 2004) as well as the processes of developing online communities (Kraut et al., 2012; Ren, Kraut, & Kiesler, 2007; Wiertz & de Ruyter, 2007). This research has highlighted that organizations Collaborative Innovation Online 295 face the challenge that the capitalization on knowledge produced by these nonfirm actors might, in fact, undermine their innovative potential by interfering with community dynamics (e.g., Cohendet & Simon, 2015; West & Lakhani, 2008). The pertinent literature has mainly focused on (1) the social dynamics of online communities underpinning the production of content (e.g., Garud, Jain, & Tuertscher, 2008; Grabher & Ibert, 2013; Jarvenpaa & Lang, 2011; West & O’Mahony, 2008); (2) the practices of knowledge sharing and advancing skills in online communities (e.g., Charband & Navimipour, 2016; Faraj, Jarvenpaa, & Majchrzak, 2011; Faraj, Kudaravalli, & Wasko, 2015; Hwang, Singh, & Argote, 2015); and, finally, (3) the processes of community building, evolution and governance (e.g., Aaltonen & Lanzara, 2015; Dahlander, Frederiksen, & Rullani, 2008; O’Mahony & Ferraro, 2007; Preece & Maloney-Krichmar, 2005). While extant studies highlight that all three dimensions of online social production are highly dynamic and interlinked in generating innovation (e.g., Aaltonen & Lanzara, 2015; Garud et al., 2008), the multifold interdependencies between dynamics of content production, skill formation, and community building over time have so far rarely been examined in a systematic fashion. In this chapter, we study online community dynamics in the context of the music industry, which is widely regarded as an exemplary case for understanding the implications of the digitization of creative content production (e.g., Dobusch & Schüßler, 2014). The music industry has undergone a number of profound changes induced by new “technological assemblages” (Leyshon, 2014, p. 10) such as by the encoding of new software formats like MP3, the emergence of internet distribution systems as well as new digitized tools for music production. Since the late twentieth century, music production has increasingly been freed from the socio-spatial constraints and financial burden of traditional studio production. Concurrently, precarious work conditions shifted music production into the realm of private reproduction (Watson, 2016). The historically dominant three major labels had to forfeit their monopoly in music production and distribution (Leyshon, 2014). In sum, the traditional vertical music industry value chain has been transformed into a complex heterarchic ecology of firms, freelance musicians, online production, and distribution platforms as well as local scenes and online communities engaging in creative content production. In order to scrutinize collaborative innovation dynamics in this unfolding new ecology, we provide an in-depth case study of the member-initiated and governed online community “February Album Writing Month” (fawm.org). The key aim of FAWM is to collaboratively produce 14 songs within the temporal constraint of a single month (in each year of its existence). By 2013, FAWM had more than 7,000 members from 30 countries (see fawm.org; Settles & Dow, 2013); in subsequent years, FAWM only displayed the number of currently active members that fluctuated between 2,300 and 2,500 active members each year. The community is not committed to complete recorded versions of finalized songs, but rather to writing and recording “song sketches” that may or may not be commercially produced later on. Similar to other online communities such as Wikipedia and Linux, the content at FAWM is collectively produced in a cumulative and openended process (e.g., Garud et al., 2008). In distinct contrast to Wikipedia and Linux, however, collaborative dynamics within FAWM are explicitly temporally 296 BENJAMIN SCHIEMER ET AL. limited to the single month of February. Despite this institutionalized termination each year, members refer to FAWM as an “online idea generator” to write songs for subsequent development. FAWM, then, epitomizes an instructive hybrid case of a temporally bracketed collaborative effort that induces openended generative processes. Our analysis elucidates that three parallel, tightly interwoven processes unfold simultaneously on FAWM: (1) the production of songs which we, alluding to Latour’s (1987) idea of science-in-the-making as a messy and ongoing process, call content-in-the-making; (2) the development of musical and technical knowledge and respective skills to which we refer as skill-in-the-making; and (3) the production of a sense of belonging, social coherence, and friendship, which we term community-in-the-making. Our analysis demonstrates that these three processes do not necessarily support each other in generating innovation in a smooth fashion. Instead, the very dynamics that induce innovation in one process might undermine generation in another when, for example, the rating of a song induces a competitive momentum that compromises the further evolution of the community built on an egalitarian and collaborative ethos. With our analysis, we seek to advance extant knowledge in two regards. First, building on Garud et al.’s (2008) notion of “incomplete by design,” we empirically substantiate the assertion that innovation in online communities cannot be reduced to a single product or process, but is more appropriately conceptualized as an ongoing production of multiple interim outcomes through three entangled processes. We demonstrate that the commitment of community members to these processes is not assured by the prospect of benefitting from final products, but by producing temporary stabilizations of provisional interim outcomes that call for further engagement of community members. Second, we reveal the crucial importance of ongoing adjustments of reinforcing structures (cf. Hargadon & Bechky, 2008) that incentivize the simultaneous production of content, skills and community to cope with the interfering dynamics of community growth, professionalization, and internal competition, thus specifying such structures for an online context. COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES Rather than the expression of an arcane genius, innovation is increasingly conceived as a collective and collaborative endeavor. As already diagnosed in the 1990s, communities of practice both within and across firms had turned into critical arenas for the collaborative production of knowledge (Brown & Duguid, 1991). With the advent of the novel socio-technical affordances of the so-called web 2.0, collaboration for innovation further shifted into the realm of geographically dispersed online communities that crystallize either around specific products or brands or are formed bottom-up independently of the corporate sector (Faraj et al., 2011; De Souza & Preece, 2004). Our focus here is on the latter type of independent communities that are neither firm-hosted nor firm-related, but still Collaborative Innovation Online 297 constitute an important element in the complex online and offline ecology of innovation in sectors such as the music industry. In contrast to communities of practice that revolve around a shared passion or interest and that are governed by a set of values and norms, such online communities typically share a “common subject matter of work” (Gläser, 2001, p. 7; Schiemer, 2018), as exemplified by scientific communities or open-source communities like Linux. Content-producing communities typically evolve and morph over time by shifting from content production to knowledge sharing or by broadening their focus by explicitly pursuing both goals simultaneously (e.g., Aaltonen & Lanzara, 2015; Fayard & DeSanctis, 2005). To account for these dynamics more systematically, Faraj et al. (2011, p. 1235) advocated to refocus research from the structural mechanisms of community governance or community members’ motivations toward the dynamic “flow and connection of ideas over time” and the “emergent properties of collaboration.” From such a dynamic perspective, technology does not determine community governance, but rather “creates the conditions in which new kinds of governance capabilities can emerge” (Aaltonen & Lanzara, 2015, p. 1667). These ongoing transformations of communities unavoidably engender challenges such as membership growth (e.g., Aaltonen & Lanzara, 2015; West & O’Mahony, 2008) or fragmentation (e.g., Garud et al., 2008) that, in turn, might be converted into a creative momentum when, for example, growth is used as an opportunity to renegotiate and reconfigure the roles, boundaries, or design of the community. Exemplified by the cases of Wikipedia and Linux, Garud et al. (2008) conceptualize the inherent and systemic “incompleteness” of socio-technical features as well as of the collaboratively produced content as the key generative attributes of open-source communities. In both communities, each design change can be seen as a form of temporary stabilization (sedimented in a version at a particular point in time) and, at the same time, a request for future activity (to revise and update a particular version). This argument resonates with the idea that information technology, rather than engendering finalized results, perpetuates the provisional and transient state of “permanently beta” (Neff & Stark, 2004). Relatedly, the processual view of Barrett, Oborn, and Orlikowski (2016) reveals how online communities simultaneously produce financial, epistemic, and reputational capital through socio-technical entanglements of digital infrastructures and agency in which tensions and frictions induce creative action (Stark, 2009). Most importantly, as these studies convincingly reveal, the socio-technical features of community design are both process and outcome: any design outcome is an intermediate step in an ongoing journey triggering further processes of community redesign and collaborative engagement. Learning in online communities, then, comes into the picture both as a process by which knowledge is encoded in routines expressing collective governance capabilities and as an outcome made possible by the evolving governance framework. (Aaltonen & Lanzara, 2015, p. 1666) Moving beyond issues of community governance, Charband and Navimipour (2016) identify factors that sustain the knowledge sharing process in online environments such as, for example, membership based on self-selection, norms 298 BENJAMIN SCHIEMER ET AL. of reciprocity, non-competitive environments and the asynchronicity of interaction (see also Grabher & Ibert, 2013). In a similar vein, Faraj, von Krogh, Monteiro, and Lakhani (2016, p. 669) stress the “enriched” rather than deficient sociality of online communities that “provide a generative landscape to sustain collaborative relations on a hitherto unknown scale.” While knowledge sharing in the respective literature is often perceived as a practice separate from community building and content production, Faraj et al. (2016, p. 678) allude to “value-generating knowledge flows” that co-constitute the stability and design of online communities. From this perspective, content production, knowledge sharing, and community building are in fact inextricably interwoven and mutually constitutive. However, what remains unresolved to date is how this mutual constitution unfolds and is enacted over time. To address this question, we shift from a variance-ontology that views innovation as an outcome toward a process-ontology that views innovation as an ongoing activity (Fortwengel, Schüßler, & Sydow, 2017; Van de Ven, Polley, Garud, & Venkataraman, 1999). This shift implies to zoom in on the messy, non-linear processes of innovating that performatively constitute online communities instead of perceiving online communities as fixed entities that need to be designed in a particular fashion to generate innovation (Garud, Gehman, Kumaraswamy, & Tuertscher, 2016; Garud, Tuertscher, & Van de Ven, 2013; Schiemer, 2018). The study of creative problem-solving in consulting firms by Hargadon and Bechky (2006) provides an instructive illustration of this particular perspective. Collective creativity occurs in fleeting moments in time that are triggered by four types of interdependent activities: (1) “help-seeking,” the active search for assistance in a problematic situation; (2) “help-giving,” the response to such an inquiry; (3) “reflective reframing,” the collective creation of a possibly more appropriate formulation of the search question; and (4) “reinforcing,” activities that support individuals in help-seeking, help-giving, and collective reframing (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006). While this perspective, developed largely through the work of the Minnesota Innovation Research Programme around Andrew Van de Ven, is already well established in innovation research in more traditional contexts, it has hardly been employed empirically in the study of online communities. An important exception is the historical account of Wikipedia by Aaltonen and Lanzara (2015), who theorize community governance as a collective capability resting upon multiple, dynamically evolving routines. Our aim in this chapter is to apply this processual lens to empirically study collaborative innovation processes online. We draw on Latour’s (1987) concept of “science-in-the-making” (that he juxtaposes to “ready-made-science”) to consider content production, skill development, and community building as deeply entwined and messy processes “in-the-making.” More specifically, we address the following research questions: how do dynamics of content-in-the-making, skillin-the-making, and community-in-the-making interact to produce moments of collaborative innovation in a member-initiated online community? What is the role of online community design in providing reinforcing structures for collaborative innovation over time? Collaborative Innovation Online 299 METHODOLOGY Case Setting In February each year, FAWM provides an online space for professional, semiprofessional, and amateur musicians to collaborate in their songwriting process. Burr Settles, a software engineer, computer scientist, and singer–songwriter launched FAWM in the United States in 2004, inspired by the website nanowrimo.org (National Novel Writing Month, with more than 200,000 members) where novelists join the collective goal in the month of November of writing a novel. Burke and Settles (2011) describe these kinds of communities as “Online Goal Setting Groups,” where amateurs and professionals alike join others in committing to a challenging goal. Between 2009 and 2013, FAWM members posted 39,301 songs to the site. In 2017, when the first author joined the community, 2,338 members posted 11,168 songs on the site, 963 of which have been documented collaborations (see fawm.org). The five core activities on FAWM are (1) uploading song sketches recorded from devices ranging from cell phones to sophisticated home studios; (2) motivating other members with comments on their song sketches and giving constructive feedback; (3) collaborating directly with others on a specific song; (4) keeping track of the overall progress; and (5) participating in forum discussions. When the institutionalized deadline approaches at the end of February, the moderators close the option to upload more songs. The option to comment on songs and to post forum threads, however, remains available throughout the following year until approximately the end of December, when Settles removes the entire content from the website to subsequently instigate the next FAWM cycle on a “tabula rasa.” Research Design: Online Ethnography A broad range of methodological strategies ranging from netnography (Kozinets, 2015) over multisited ethnography (Marcus, 1995) to reflexive ethnography (Davies, 2012) are available for an ethnographic engagement with online communities. Our empirical analysis of FAWM is based on a cross-platform and multisited online ethnography harvesting data from an ecology of websites such as Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Facebook, and YouTube, and, of course, FAWM. These sites were selected by following outgoing links from the FAWM website either in the descriptions of the user profiles or in forum discussions. Since activities on FAWM are not only limited to text posts (e.g., forum discussions), but also include listening, recording, uploading, and collaborating on audio material, the active participation of the first author in a reflective, auto-ethnographic fashion (Pink et al., 2015) was instrumental in collecting a particularly rich set of data. In line with a processual perspective, we study innovation at FAWM from the analytical angle of “events” (Langley, 1999) that mark critical turning points or the moments in which the various innovation dynamics interact (Langley, 2009). In order to address our research questions, we are centered on events on two different time scales. First, we zoom in on events on a small-scale, that is, on the 300 BENJAMIN SCHIEMER ET AL. concrete collaborative dynamics unfolding in the course of two single FAWM months. Second, we study critical moments of community redesign in the course of FAWM’s entire history (from the beginning in 2004–2018). Data Collection We collected in-depth data in two successive FAWM cycles in February 2017 and February 2018. In addition to observations, the first author, who is a semiprofessional musician, joined the community twice as a musician playing the guitar and the Indian sitar, and collaboratively produced seven song sketches in the first cycle and another five in the second. Furthermore, the first author conducted 12 in-depth interviews with members and moderators via Skype and two explorative interviews with participating members of the 2016 challenge. The interview partners were sampled according to different degrees of community involvement. Through this sampling method, our analysis is not limited to the dynamics unfolding in the most active community segment, but in fact covers the entire community. “Novices” to FAWM typically act as lurkers who only passively observe, and who only have a passing interest; “minglers” are socializers who maintain strong personal ties but are only superficially interested in producing songs themselves; “devotees” are primarily interested in producing songs and developing their personal skills, rather than maintaining social ties with the community; finally, only the category of “insiders” is driven by multiple motivations, but depend on the other responses and reactions from the other categories for visibility and collaboration. The first author was able to cover each of these categories, which were developed by Kozinets (2015), with at least one interview and to interview two members in both studied FAWM cycles to monitor the development of community development over time (e.g., novices morphing into more active members). In order to track activities that shift from the online to the offline realm, the first author conducted two face-to-face interviews with local FAWM members and joined a jam session that was recorded an uploaded on FAWM. Archival data from forum posts from 2017 and 2016, field notes from observing ongoing interactions, and so-called “elicited data” (Kozinets, 2015) co-created in interaction with members and documented in the form of transaction protocols (reaching from short interactions on the platform over daily chat conversations to email conversations up to all four weeks of February) were additionally collected. For the period that preceded our participation in 2017, we used web. archive.org to access older versions by screenshots of the website from 2004 to 2016 to gain access to the development of the design and the number of members and to archived activities (see Table 12.1). Data Analysis Our data analysis proceeded in several steps. Based on an initial review of the literature and four exploratory interviews, we followed the production of a song through a single FAWM cycle. The coding of the initial dataset with the qualitative data analysis software NVivo aimed at categorizing the highly distributed interactions between members on FAWM on the one hand, and related Collaborative Innovation Online 301 Table 12.1. Data Collection from February 2017 to February 2018. Data Type 200 Hours of Observation 14 Interviews Active Participation Access Via Textual Visual Audio-visual Audio Interview Transcripts Interaction Protocols Online FAWM, Facebook, Soundcloud, Skype, Email, Chat Forum posts, Comments, Bulletin board, Profiles Photos (profile pictures, equipment, studio facilities), Screenshots from older versions YouTube videos Song recordings 11 Interviews 32 Interaction protocols Offline Face-to-face 3 Interviews Offline jam session 308 BENJAMIN SCHIEMER ET AL. “FAWM Guidelines and Etiquette,” implemented in 2012, further underlined the collaborative ethos of the community (Webarchive FAWM Screenshot, 2012): […] Keep the focus on creativity and productivity. Everyone will be reasonable. Everyone expects everyone else to be reasonable. Do not be offended if someone suggests you are not being reasonable. Only from 2013 onward songs could be tagged as “collaborative” with other members. This tagging provided visibility of documented collaborations that soon became a valuable outcome at FAWM that supported both the process of content-in-the-making and community-in-the-making. Professionalization in the production of songs turned out to be a second driver of interferences besides growth of membership. Professionalization, in fact, was intensely debated in the forums and among the administrators, leading to several readjustments in the website’s design as well. In 2009, a “Wiki” replaced the previous blog to further enable the process of skill-in-the-making (Webarchive FAWM Screenshot, 2009): In previous FAWM events, the community have (sic) generated a wealth of information about songwriting, demo recording techniques, CD production and promotion, etc. For the sixth annual FAWM in 2009, we decided to launch a Wiki so that some of this knowledge can be consolidated in one place for reference to all. Easy access to knowledge on producing high-quality recordings increasingly started to interfere with the content-in-the-making process within a community that was explicitly dedicated to low barriers to entry. This lingering conflict was discussed in the forums, indicating the reflexivity of the FAWM community that aimed at down-playing the relative importance of the recording quality. The Wiki was eventually transformed into the FAQ section. The third driver of interferences among the various in-the-making processes, competition, resulted in attempts to curb respective dynamics within the community: “FAWM is not a competition. Art is not a competition” (Interview moderator E.). Consequently, any rating features such as a “like button,” for example, were eschewed, even though the community repeatedly questioned this decision. Likewise, ranking mechanisms that would allow conclusions about to the quality or popularity of a song, such as the number of received comments, were deliberately avoided. Instead, new features integrated into the website were geared toward counting content production as well as community-building activities, and subsequently publishing the numbers in the forum (in terms of the number of published songs, comments, Zong-busting, etc.). Moderator E. explains these decisions in the following quote: Some of the things that people ask for and that we’ve debated back and forth were the “LikeButton” from Facebook … or some way to track how many times a given song has been played. We’ve had certain features like that even in previous considerations, but these dropped out … because what ends up happening: there is a natural competitiveness that people have. People want look at things as a popularity contest, but FAWM is hard enough … the one thing that always seems to come up at FAWM almost every year is … well: “does the most number of comments mean it is the best song?” Actually no! It is completely unrelated! Collaborative Innovation Online 309 Even though some of the members of the community asked for a rating system, Settles and the moderators deliberately refused to integrate a song-rating mechanism. Rankings were once implemented, and members could display songs in order of received comments, but subsequently these rankings were abandoned. However, quantified rankings were implemented regarding members’ reputation (“the more comments the better”) within the community to sustain communityin-the-making dynamics, thus shifting competition around content production and quality toward competition around active community membership. E. recalls when members started to count the number of their comments as a way of tracking community activities. This development resulted in the “Century Club” to which members were promoted by moderators as soon as their number of comments exceeded 100. In 2018, the most active FAWMer was M. who posted over 700 comments in 28 days. In addition to responses to challenges posed by community dynamics, Settles, a scholar of computer engineering and human–computer interaction, himself added features on the basis of data analytics tools to FAWM a view times. One was a novel song title generator as well as a word cloud generator for stimulating creativity in songwriting. When the number of uncommented songs started to rise, Settles analyzed social network data and identified collaboration patterns in the community (Settles & Dow, 2013). As soon as Settles and his co-author realized that the amount of comments was a central driver for visibility and motivation at FAWM, they were keen to motivate members to give comments. In 2009, Settles published a scatter plot based on data from 2008 (Webarchive FAWM Screenshot, 2009) that revealed that giving and receiving comments on songs are positively correlated (with a correlation coefficient of 0.79). Based on these findings, the website was redesigned to further encourage people to comment on other people’s songs to strengthen the community. Furthermore, Settles and Dow conclude that the application of their analysis could be used for “intelligent recommendations for members in search of good collaborators” (p. 25), a feature that has not (yet) been integrated into the website. Summary The generative dynamics of FAWM are constituted by the three processes contentin-the-making, skill-in-the-making, and community-in-the-making. Each of the processes yields a provisional outcome that entices further engagement. In moments of collaborative innovation, content-in-the-making results in a provisional song sketch that invites feedback and thereby concomitantly propels community-in-the-making processes since the visibility gained through comments strengthens the sense of belonging. Reciprocal commenting and feedback also leads to newly acquired skills and improves the overall recording quality of the produced songs. Offering specific know-how to the community, for example, via the forums, further advances community building and content production since a knowledgeable community yields more potential collaborators for further song productions. These dynamics are kept “in sync” by reinforcing structures 310 BENJAMIN SCHIEMER ET AL. that provide incentives to engage in community building and skill development as much as they create a goal-driven setting for producing 14 songs in 28 days (see Fig. 12.1). Conversely, FAWM had to grapple with interferences among the three in-the-making processes. First, growth in membership and the number of produced song sketches challenged the ability of members to comment on songs which reduced visibility and ultimately undermined the communityinthe-making process. Second, the increasing professionalization led to an over emphasis on production quality and thereby raised, in conflict with the amateur ethos of the community, barriers to content production and community building. Third, rating and ranking mechanisms as means of competitive commenting in the community-in-the-making process led to an overemphasis of skills at the expense of reaching the proclaimed goal of producing a high quantity of new ideas. To cope with these dynamics, reinforcing structures repeatedly had to be adjusted in order to get the three processes back “into sync” (see Fig. 12.2). Fig. 12.1. In Sync – Complementary Reinforcements among Processes at FAWM. Collaborative Innovation Online 311 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS Online communities have evolved into a key arena of collaborative innovation across organizational boundaries. The extant literature on online communities has related their innovative potential to particular features of online collaborative production (e.g., Jarvenpaa & Lang, 2011), particularly to the dynamics of knowledge and skill development (e.g., Faraj et al., 2011) and community building and governance (e.g., Dahlander et al., 2008). By primarily focusing on opensource communities, and Wikipedia and Linux in particular, research so far has elaborated the ways in which these communities foster ongoing engagement (Garud et al., 2008) and adjust their governance structure to ensure the production of quality content in the face of growing membership (e.g., O’Mahony & Ferraro, 2007). This chapter seeks to advance our understanding of collaborative innovation processes in online communities in two respects. First, we apply an “innovationas-process” perspective (e.g., Van de Ven et al., 1999) that shifts the focus from Fig. 12.2. Out of Sync – Interferences among Processes at FAWM. 312 BENJAMIN SCHIEMER ET AL. perceiving online communities as pre-given organizational entities toward studying the processes and activities that engender communities “in-the-making” (Latour, 1987). This process perspective is instrumental to reveal the messy entanglements of content-in-the-making, skill-in-the-making, and community-in-themaking as parallel. From this perspective, a sense of belonging to a community, in previous literature described as a stabilized feeling (McMillan & Chavis, 1986), itself becomes an innovative outcome of a community that needs to be continuously (re-)produced. Second, our empirical account of an online community dedicated to the production of creative content elucidates the important role played by reinforcing structures for stimulating each of these processes as a basis for moments of collaborative innovation, as well as the need to adjust these reinforcing structures to emerging challenges posed by community development over time. Our findings indicate that the three interrelated processes of content-in-themaking, skill-in-the-making, and community-in-the-making are triggered and maintained by temporary stabilizations of provisional, interim outcomes. A song that is tagged as incomplete, for example, invites comments and advice from other community members. The temporary marker “incomplete,” then, prompts activities that resonate with the generative practices of help-seeking, help-giving, collective reframing, and reinforcing identified by Hargadon and Bechky (2006). In the “permanently beta”-context of an online community (Neff & Stark, 2006), these activities do not necessarily result in a final “cumulative synthesis” (cf. Garud et al., 2016) but rather sustain the collaborative momentum of producing content, enhancing skills, and developing the community over time. The three generative processes are, therefore, open-ended, only temporarily bracketed by the month of February. While this temporal bracketing itself constitutes a kind of reinforcing structure that enables heightened activity along several dimensions, additional reinforcing structures were needed to stimulate the simultaneous production of content, skills, and community. While our use of the word “synchronization” in this regard does not imply a strict form of temporal alignment of the three processes, which in the light of the often asynchronous nature of virtual interactions does not seem adequate or even desirable, it still implies the complementarity of the three processes that depend on and feed into each other and need to be given equal weight in community design. The present study also elucidates interferences between the three interrelated process of content-in-the-making, skill-in-the-making, and community-in-themaking. First, these interferences were caused by the growth of the community. While the generative potential of the community fostered a growth in membership, this growth in turn tipped the balance of the three processes in favor of content production. Second, interferences among the processes of content-inthe-making, skill-in-the-making, and community-in-the-making were caused by growing expertise resulting in a higher entry barrier for new members. And third, quintessential practices such as tagging, rating, or commenting induced a growing focus on songs as final products and, through this very dynamic, undermined the collaborative production of ideas. Subsequent interventions in the interface design aimed at sustaining the collaborative ethos of the community by shifting competition around content to competition around community engagement (see Collaborative Innovation Online 313 also Gulbrandson & Just, 2011) and, thereby, providing reinforcing structures for ensuring an equal balance of all three processes so that they can feed into each other. The “in-the-making” perspective on online communities advanced in the present chapter raises further questions concerning collaborative innovation processes that span across organizational boundaries. First, as the case of FAWM has shown, member-initiated online communities can be important sites for the development of content, skills, and community that might be prone to commercial exploitation later on. Yet, firms’ attempts to tap into these kinds of communities and strategically orchestrate them might induce competitive dynamics that undermine the very generative dynamics of content production, skill development, and community building the firm seems to benefit from. Second, further research seems required to reveal and conceptualize the complex interplay of the broad spectrum of online communities and platforms that are mobilized in dispersed collaborative online settings. 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