=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2789/paper17
|storemode=property
|title=Collective Intelligence, Crowd Dynamics, and Co-Creation: Preliminary Insights from a Case Study in Robotics Innovation Facilities (RIFs)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2789/paper17.pdf
|volume=Vol-2789
|authors=Gianluigi Viscusi
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/stpis/Viscusi20
}}
==Collective Intelligence, Crowd Dynamics, and Co-Creation: Preliminary Insights from a Case Study in Robotics Innovation Facilities (RIFs)==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2789/paper17.pdf
Collective Intelligence, Crowd Dynamics, and Co-Creation:
preliminary insights from a Case Study in Robotics Innovation
Facilities (RIFs)
Gianluigi Viscusia
a
Imperial College Business School, South Kensington Campus, SW7 2AZ, London, UK
Abstract
This article investigates crowd dynamics in co-creation settings. In particular, it aims to provide
an understanding of how those dynamics eventually shape collective intelligence in co-creation
activities, either enabling or bounding their capacity of scaling. Furthermore, different value
perspectives are questioned through the shapes that co-creation practices may assume once
moving from local groups and communities to a population assuming the dimension of the
crowd. Thus, the article aims to contribute to the research on cooperative strategies involving
users as innovators, with a specific focus on high tech industries and co-creation in
experimental settings, suitable to lead to innovation related to emergent technologies. To this
end, the article considers the early insights from the specific case of a robotics innovation
facility based in Italy, where an ethnography has been carried out in 2018-2019 and presents
the results from an early analysis of the data.
Keywords 1
Collective intelligence, crowd-driven innovation, co-creation, robotics.
1. Introduction
This article studies crowd dynamics in co-creation settings. The aim is to provide an understanding
of how those dynamics eventually shape collective intelligence [1], [2] in co-creation activities, either
enabling or bounding their capacity of scaling. Furthermore, different value perspectives are questioned
through the shapes that co-creation practices may assume once moving from local groups and
communities to a population assuming the dimension of the anonymous crowd. Thus, the article aims
to contribute to the research on cooperative strategies involving users as innovators, with a specific
focus on high tech industries and co-creation in experimental settings suitable to lead to innovation
related to emergent technologies. In particular, this article presents a set of early insights from an
exploratory case study on robotics innovation facilities. To this end, the article considers the specific
case of a robotics innovation facility based in Italy, where an ethnography has been carried out in 2018-
2019. The theoretical argument is empirically developed through the analysis of the early data from the
case of a Robotics Innovation Facility (RIF) based in Tuscany, Italy, in the town of Peccioli. The RIF
is one of three similar initiatives funded by the European project ECHORD++ (The European
Coordination Hub for Open Robotics Development) [3] to provide access to businesses as well as a
general audience to high-tech equipment and expertise, thus eventually promoting and enabling co-
creation in robotics. Those facilities are laboratories with a specific configuration of open physical or
virtual infrastructures for collective efforts of ideation, invention, research, and development innovation
[4]. It is worth noting here that a RIF has a set of characteristics that are also eventually shared by living
labs and testbeds [5].
Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Socio-Technical Perspective in IS Development (STPIS 2020), June 8-9, 2020
EMAIL: g.viscusi@imperial.ac.uk
ORCID: 0000-0003-0770-7108
© 2020 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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Taking those issues into account, the tension with the common-sense definition of “facility”2 as well
as the implicit dialectic with other experimental spaces (e.g., living labs or testbeds) makes “facility”
worth questioning together with the crowd and co-creation mechanisms. These latter especially act
when facilities scale to eventually become infrastructures [6] for the design and development of new
systems, having societal impacts, such as the robotic ones [7], [8]. Consequently, the paper tries to
address this specific gap through an empirical analysis of a facility for robotics innovation and its testing
activities involving various kinds of crowds, thus clarifying their main characteristics and the linkages
between them and crowd-driven innovation. Furthermore, the data have been analyzed also for eliciting
how the different actors make sense of their participation in the facilities’ activities as “organized artful
practice” [9, p. 11]. Thus, the inductive and interpretive stance for the exploratory case study presented
in this paper is guided by a set of general research questions: what are the characteristics of facilities
compared to other testing environments? How those characteristics are configured in the case of
facilities for robotics innovation? Are their users considered individually or else they form different
collective units engaged in testing and experimenting with robotics innovation? How do they make
sense or understand their participation in those activities? When forming a collective, how this does
eventually act or impact on the outcomes of the testing and experimenting facilities?
The research is framed under the tradition of sociotechnical-design [10] for its investigation of how
human factors enter the specific domain of the design and development of robotics artifacts and their
consequent impact on the innovation they should introducing, e.g., in healthcare, production processes,
or well-being. In the research presented in this article, specific attention is dedicated to the spaces where
the design and testing of those artifacts take place, thus, particularly focusing on two of the principles
of sociotechnical design stated by Cherns [11, p. 790]:
• the principle of “boundary location”, which in our case study aims to consider the
“departmental” boundaries drawn within and by the facility, in terms of technology and
territory (not considering the time dimension here) [10, p. 788];
• the principle of “support congruence”, which states that “the system of social support
should be designed so as to reinforce the behaviors which the organization structure is
designed to elicit” [10, p. 790]. This principle is relevant to understand the implications of
co-creation on the alignment between the RIF management general philosophy and its
actions.
Then, those two principles are especially important for the question of which values are enacted by
the artifacts through the involvement of different kinds of crowds in their design and testing. Taking
these issues into account, the paper is structured as follows. First, an outline of the research method
followed for this study is provided. Then, a discussion presents the early results coming from the
analyses carried out during and after the fieldwork before concluding remarks end the paper.
2. Method
Although the article adopts some specific lenses coming from sociotechnical tradition, its goal is not
to produce an artifact, but rather to conduct interpretive research to problematize [12] the design
principles coming from that tradition as also instantiated in the user-centered design perspectives
adopted in robotics for the requirements engineering activities [13]–[15]. Accordingly, this article
presents an exploratory interpretive case study [16], [17] that at this stage aims to provide an early
understanding of the substantive domain subject of the analyses. Also, the case would eventually lead
to an early conceptual description, shown in Figure 1.
Furthermore, the research at the basis of the case study has included desk research on documents
and websites providing information on the RIF of Peccioli, the ECHORD++ project in general, the
other related organizations, as well as memos and materials from an 11 days ethnography at the
BioRobotics Institute and the Assistive Robotics lab, where the RIF is located. It is worth noting that
2
According to what could be considered as a common-sense definition as the one by Wikipedia, a laboratory is “a facility that provides
controlled conditions in which scientific or technological research, experiments, and measurement may be performed” [30]. Furthermore, a
facility seems to be, on the one hand, a general “virtual” class of entities, including “laboratory” as a specific kind of facility; on the other
hand, it appears as one of its many forms of “actualization” [31], thus, not strictly related to the domain of scientific research and experiments.
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the days of the ethnography were distributed along with different visits from September 2018 to March
2019. Besides extended involvement and observation, 12 people have been interviewed, including post-
docs working on projects at the Assistive Robotics Lab, a former Ph.D./project manager at RIF-Peccioli,
senior scientists, professors at the BioRobotics Institute, its former head, and the chief executive officer
(CEO) of a local firm who actively participated as project manager of the RIF, likewise.
The selection of the interviewees has started with the managers and directors of the RIF and people
involved directly in the activities of the RIF within ECHORD++, then following a respondent-driven
sampling. The interviews were semi-structured, whose average length was 30 minutes, resulting in
nearly seven hours for transcription, including one interview of ~83 minutes with a key informant, being
the former head of the Institute at the time of ECHORD++ and a key figure in the consortium of the
project as well as in the substantive research area. Memos and field notes taken during the fieldwork
are part of the corpus of data that have been analyzed following the sequence of open coding, selective
coding, and theoretical coding of the classic or glaserian grounded theory [18]. However, it is worth
noting that the research presented in this paper is not a grounded theory, but rather an interpretive case
study [16] and it is the result of a first exploration of the data, where coding is still ongoing, being
actually completed mainly the open coding and part of the selective coding steps.
3. The Case Study
3.1. Definition of the context
The case study considers the Robotics Innovation Facility (RIF) based in Peccioli, a small town
close to Pisa (PI) in Italy. Together with Bristol in the United Kingdom and Paris-Saclay in France, this
is one of the three RIFs promoted by the ECHORD++ (The European Coordination Hub for Open
Robotics Development) research project, the follow-up to a former ECHORD project [19], [20]. The
goal of the RIFs was the opening to businesses and interested users of labs equipped with state-of-the-
art robotic hardware and software as well as scientific and technical expertise [21]. The case study also
includes an analysis of the unit of The BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA)
based in Pontedera (PI), Italy involved in ECHORD++ (the RIF being one of its innovation services)
as well as of the BioRobotics Institute’s Assistive Robotics Lab located in Peccioli (PI), physically
hosting the RIF.
3.2. Discussion of the preliminary insights
This Section presents the main insights from the analysis of the results of the open and selective
coding activity. The results have been early interpreted through a framework adopted in a former
publication co-authored by the author of this paper for mapping crowd dynamics in innovation [22].
As a preliminary remark, the RIF of Peccioli is regarded by the informants as an “idea” and not a
specific space: “the overall BioroBotics institute” is a RIF where companies can find the expertise and
spaces for their innovation needs. In general, while developed through separate silos, the different
laboratories of the Institute seem to create a unified virtual environment in the form of a large innovation
facility for businesses and society. Whereas facilities such as the above-mentioned Assistive Robotics
Lab are tied to the internal users’ acquaintance and recognition, the RIF is actually abstracted from the
Lab situatedness for naming a set of functions and affordances worth promoting in the ECHORD++
project and eventually designating new potential actual instantiations for them. Thus, naming the RIF
makes it virtually exist, becoming ideally real for the actual interactions of the ECHORD++ projects -
promotional videos, tweets on Twitter, while abstracted from the local acquaintance of the place. Two
entities in one.
Furthermore, the actors directly or indirectly involved in the RIF design activities, testing, and
experiments include a wide range of people and organizations, spanning from local inhabitants of
Peccioli and other nearby towns like Florence, local politicians (e.g. the mayor of Peccioli), spin-offs,
start-ups, small and medium enterprises (e.g. a local winemaker). This diversity leads to the different
types of crowds that intervene in the activities of the RIF as shown by Figure 1 with various degrees of
seriality, here defined by the independence ad anonymity of the individuals making up the crowds. In
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particular, those types span from restricted (i.e., respectively, “crowd crystals” as the selected groups
of people involved in the design of the artifact in the “domotics” room internal to the facility, and
“closed crowds” as, e.g., the testing set in hospitals, etc.) to unrestricted forms as the ones exhibited by
“communities” (made up by the inhabitants of the small town close to the facility, providing the sample
of users during the design phase at the facility) or “open crowds” (when robots are tested openly in the
streets of the small town surrounding the facility). Accordingly, the diversity of crowds that intervene
in the testing activities has specific effects on the “values” embedded in the design of the robotics
products and services (through groups and local communities’ sample of users) and the value
(economic, public, and social) created or eventually captured through the testing and experiments on
open and closed crowds, not necessarily including the same sample of users but a larger population
(e.g., tourists passing through the villages where co-creation happens or people in external settings
different from the rooms of the Assistive Robotics Lab).
Yes
COMMUNITIES OPEN CROWD
Unrestricted
Design
Growth
Testing
CROWD CRYSTALS CLOSED CROWD
Restricted
No
Low Seriality High
Independence Anonymity
Figure 1: Crowd dynamics in the design and testing activities of the RIF, presented through the
framework adapted from [22].
Consequently, the diversity in the population is also reflected in the different kinds of value created
by the RIF activities. The eventual economic value for businesses is in the background of the general
narrative promoted by the official documents, from the perspective of the high-level decision-makers
and directors at the Institute as well as by researchers moved from a research staff position to a project
manager role. Considering other forms of value created, public value is mainly exhibited by public
sector stakeholders, while social value seems more from the side of citizens involved in the RIF
experiments. However, challenges emerged, for example, during external experiments involving the
mobility of robots across the streets of Peccioli for the urban characteristics of this quite typical Tuscany
small venue.
Thus, the different types of value for the RIF, emergent from the case study analysis of the crowd
dynamics, are shown in Figure 1, which adapts the framework proposed by [22] for tracking the
movement of design and testing activities across groups as “crowd crystals”3 [23], communities, open
and closed crowds. Accordingly, the set of observable values are ranging from the values of scientists,
engineers, designers, through the values of laypersons participating in the co-creation process and the
values of the context where the co-creation process take place, to the values actually exhibited by the
final robotics artifact. Considering now the RIF from an ecosystem perspective [24], while developed
through a network of apparently separate silos, the different laboratories of the Institute seem instead
3
We follow here the definition of “crowd crystal”, provided by Elias Canetti in its book “Crowds and Power” [23] as “the small, rigid groups
of men, strictly delimited and of great constancy, which serve to precipitate the crowd. Their structure is such that they can comprehended
and taken in at a glance. Their unity is more important than their size. Their role must be familiar; people must know what they are there for.
Doubt about their function would render them meaningless” (Ibid., p. 73).
130
to create a unified virtual environment in the form of a large innovation facility for businesses and
society. As a consequence, while at a glance the organizational structure seems to follow a hierarchical
form, the existence of different groups developing in harmony different programs may suggest that
“heterarchy” [25] would be an appropriate concept to describe the actual organizational forms of the
RIF, including the above mentioned Institute and its associated labs.
Those elements seem relevant, on the one hand, to question and further problematize the move of
the RIF from being an individual actor situated in a larger ecosystem to being the center for an emerging
infrastructure [6], [26] for the design and testing of robotics innovation; on the other hand, this move
asks for a further investigation on how various social worlds [27] outside the traditional laboratories
are more and more included in that emerging infrastructure [5].
4. Conclusion
This article has presented the early insights from an exploratory case study on robotics innovation
facilities (RIFs). Moreover, for the results of the study are mainly preliminary, further research will be
conducted in future work. However, the paper aims to position some of the main arguments for studying
the emergence of specific infrastructures from robotics innovation facilities and their ecosystems, often
including research institutions, policymakers, public administration, private organizations as well as
representatives of the civil society. Consequently, future work will reconsider the early analyses and
results that have been presented in this paper through a preliminary conceptual description to further
theorize from the case [28] and do a grounded theory following the glaserian or classic grounded theory
[18], [29], with further theoretical sampling and coding also from other materials collected during the
fieldwork and the subsequent year.
5. Acknowledgments
This work has been supported by the project SCALINGS (Scaling Up Co-creation: Avenues and
Limits for Integrating Society in Science and Innovation), which has received funding from the
European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement 788359.
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