Power, creativity and controversy: these are three keywords for yielding more results from innovation communities. However, it is not just simply more power, more creativity and more controversy that a community needs… Or is it?

Some time ago I was researching an employee-driven innovation community (EDI). The community was developed for the purpose of optimizing and innovating business processes, procedures and products by starting a dialogue between staff members and other employees. Main mechanism was sharing ideas and thoughts, followed by discussion to shave away the edginess to eventually result in a useful concept for that particular organization.

Background
First let me give some background on my research object. KLM is a Netherlands-based airline. Ground Source is one of its online communities, designed and developed by Favela Fabric for KLM Ground Services. This division of KLM is in charge of processing the daily intake of passengers. Ground Source was divided in two separate areas, which were the themes area and the bulletin board. The themes area was structured and divided into themes in which solutions or suggestions were sought by KLM. Reactions were possible in the form of textual comments and voting. The other section was called the bulletin board, which provided more freedom to participants on which matters to discuss. The main restriction was that posts should somehow be related to KLM Ground Services. Besides innovation related threads, this also led to threads being opened with mainly a social function or with technical questions regarding Ground Source.

The aim of my research was to study stimulating and inhibiting factors of innovation-related behavior within an EDI. Giddens’ Structuration Theory was used for the sociological perspective. However, due to the abstract nature of this theory, other theories concerning creativity and user roles were added for an operationalization of the modalities from Giddens’ theory. This sociological approach is not witnessed much in other research concerned with these kinds of communities, which is strange. If you think of a brainstorm session; does it yield innovative behavior because it is called a brainstorm session or is it something else? The outcome of such a session is a logical consequence of an accumulation of social related behavior. I believe this is also true for an online community which has the goal to yield (innovative) ideas and suggestions.

Some theory
An in-depth consideration of Giddens’ Structuration Theory goes beyond the scope of the post. Therefore I restrict myself to a brief explanation of the three modalities from the Structuration Theory, which are interpretive schemes, facilities and norms. This was also the focus of this research.

• The Interpretive scheme can be seen as a framework, from which people think, reason and communicate with each other (e.g. in a particular setting users are discussing the economic situation at a very academic level, other people joining that conversation start exhibiting the same behavior)  .
• Some users have more facilities than others, enabling them to exercise a higher amount of power (e.g. having the ability to sanction others).
• Norms are mostly determined by culture and societal layers. They shape the way we are ought to behave in a particular situation.

Results
Results of my study showed that users with more facilities are crucial in an EDI, since their interventions have a massive impact on the interaction within threads. Furthermore, it is also clear that highly creative expressions are important for setting up a creative interpretive scheme that positively affects interaction. The most important conclusions that can be drawn from my research are now summarized in a nutshell:

• Highly creative expressions at the beginning of a thread set the interpretive scheme for that what follows in a particular thread.
• Not only moderators and theme managers have a considerable amount of power, also people who present themselves as an authority in a particular area enjoy almost the same amount of power. They all have a large impact on the interaction within the online community.
• The presence of controversy has a positive effect on the level of innovative behavior (e.g. voting negatively or creative behavior); except when that controversy is coming from someone who has more power or when no controversial reactions are given (positive votes and lots of encouragement).

Creativity, controversy and power seem to be key elements for the success of an innovation-aimed FOC, as can be deduced from above. However, it is not just simply more from these elements, to make such a community a success. It is a delicate social process.

By having said all above, I can now return to the title of this post: “To intervene, or not to intervene”. Community moderators should be very careful in when and what they say in a discussion, because it may have a massive impact on the course and content of a discussion. For example, by questioning the feasibility of a particular idea the discussion changes from innovative to defensive thinking or bleeds out completely. Moderators can also shift the whole nature of the discussion from innovation-related to something different by just asking the wrong questions. More positively, moderators’ constructive criticism seems to interact with highly creative expressions at the beginning of a thread, which enables them to steer a discussion without constraining innovation-related behavior. Noteworthy is that these results affected the moderation style of Favela Fabric.

In my concluding remark I stress that the results of my research indicate that it is worthwhile to handle a sociological perspective in this research area and thus should be explored further in future research.