Chapter 5: Research Analysis and Discussion
5.3. Toward an Integral Understanding of Co-creation and Co-service
5.3.1. Differentiating Co-creation and Co-service
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agents. Although transforming a cooperative crowdsourcing initiative into a collaborative crowdservicing initiative may involve more complex procedures and mechanism, a transition to a decentralized platform with strong mechanism that can attract root-up initiatives may enable the possibility for a cooperative crowdsourcing initiative to transform into a collaborative crowdservicing initiative.
By enabling a platform that facilitates connection, crowdsourcing can be shifted to the next evolutionary collaboration practice, crowdservicing. From the secondary case study, one of the key differences that Quora has with Yahoo! Answers is simply the editing and commenting mechanisms by others on an answer. This enables the participating agents to connect and elaborated on the collected content, which in turn would provide the possibility for the recursive iteration between collective and connective collaboration to occur. By adding such simple mechanism that facilitate connective collaboration, Quora is able provide more accurate answers compared to Yahoo! Answers, which may generate more social and experience values that would result in creating more monetary values.
5.3. T OWARD AN I NTEGRAL U NDERSTANDING OF
C O - CREATION AND C O - SERVICE
The findings in this research aim to provide an integral understanding of co-creation and co-service. This research have differentiated co-creation and co-service as well as providing insights to how co-creation can be shift into co-service.
5.3.1. Differentiating Co-creation and Co-service
The differentiating characteristics between co-creation and co-service can be mirror from the differentiating characteristics between crowdsourcing and crowdservicing, since both are collaborative practices that are applied within the context of the World Wide Web.
Figure 5.1. and Figure 5.2. are graphical representations of the co-creation and co-service from a platform’s perspective. This is developed since the Web is
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platform and that the findings from crowdsourcing and crowdservicing can only be mirror under a platform’s construct. However, from a broad perspective this platform is not restricted as a platform within the Web; it can be a simplified representation of an ecosystem with constructs beyond the scope of this research or the Web as a platform.
The characteristic for co-service is shown in Figure 5.1. The blue circle is the complete picture of the platform while the brown square is part of this platform.
The red arrow signifies the recursive iterations between collective and connective collaboration. It represents the mechanism that enables connective collaboration between the participating agents as well as the collective collaboration between the participating agents and the platform. In other words, the red arrow represents collaboration on the platform and upon the platform. The white arrow represents further collection of participating agents or contents onto the platform that enhances the recursive iteration occurring between existing participating agents and resources.
The characteristic for co-creation is shown in Figure 5.2. The blue circle is the complete picture of the platform while the brown square is part of this platform.
The blue and orange arrow representing participating agent of this platform contributing upon the platform, or in other words, the platform is collecting the collaborative efforts of its participating agents. The white arrows signify that participating agents communicate and collaborate for the purpose of contributing upon the platform. The purple arrow represents more collection of participating agents or contents onto the platform.
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Platform
Attraction and Incentive from
Iteration
Figure 5.1.: A simplified representation of co-service from a platform perspective
Participating Agents
Participating Agents
Future Participating
Agents Direct Collaboration
Connection Recursive Connective
and Collective Collaboration Iteration
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Platform
Figure 5.2.: A simplified representation of co-creation from a platform perspective
Attraction and Incentive from
Platform
Future Participating
Agents Collaboration via
Platform
Collaboration via Platform
Participating Agents
Participating Agents Platform Collects
Collaboration Result
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From the graphical representation of co-creation and co-service, it is apparent that the key difference lies in the difference in the interactive processes among the participating agents and the platform. This difference would embody and imply the different characteristics of co-creation and co-service. The recursive interaction between collective and connective collaboration enabled co-service platforms to be passive, such that this interaction process would enable interests to converge among the platform’s present participating agents. This interaction process would also encourage other participating agents to join the platform since the interaction created clear interest convergence that increases the visibility and clarity of the interest for prospect participating agents. Such increase in visibility and clarity of interest would then attract more prospect participating agents that share the exact same interest. This implies that co-service can enable the platform to “automatically”
scale-up without providing the incentive given that the interactive mechanism is adequately structured. Since the interactive mechanism would create values that can be served as incentives for scaling-up.
Co-creation on the other hand lacks such a recursive iterative collaboration process. Since this research demonstrated that incentive is crucial for co-creation, the platform would have to actively provided incentive for the participating agents to contribute, as demonstrated by the green and orange arrows in Figure 5.2. The collaboration between the participating agents may be recursive, but incentive must be constantly provided for this recursion to continue. In addition, for the co-creation to be scaled-up there must be incentives for prospect participating agents. This implies that co-creation platforms require constant establishment of incentives or else the platform would fail to function. This incentive can be of monetary, social or experience value.
It is worth noting that albeit the characteristics differences between co-creation and co-service, both collaboration practices converge on value creation. From the secondary case on Yahoo! Answers and Quora, co-service emerged in the Quora case because co-creation practices like that of Yahoo! Answer cannot provide an efficient scale up mechanism for more value.
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