[ESSEC Knowledge] by Harris Kyriakou - Professor at ESSEC Business School

Is novelty trading off with practicality? In new research forthcoming in MIS Quarterly (1), Harris Kyriakou (ESSEC Business School) and his colleagues Jeffrey Nickerson (Stevens Institute of Technology) and Ann Majchrzak (University of Southern California) explored how novelty, and the structure of preexisting designs affect product development processes in online innovation communities.  

What are online innovation communities? 

Online innovation communities, rather than focusing on participants’ profiles, focus on the development of products. They’re distinguishable from other online knowledge production communities like Wikipedia and open source software forums in three key ways:

1. They don’t have one single production goal, with the content being evaluated based on its novelty, rather than the knowledge it includes
2. They are designed around artifacts made by individuals, not team-based projects
3. Novelty plays a crucial role in retaining and keeping participants engaged with the community 

In online innovation communities, the term “design landscape” is used to refer to the place where the search for a design occurs (2). An array of artifacts forms this design landscape, and members of the community search the landscape for new designs and add their own. The idea is to add and identify artifacts that are novel in relation to other artifacts: novel artifacts capture people’s attention. However, past work has also suggested that novelty creates uncertainty, leading associated costs to increase (3, 4). 

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