WisconsInnovation

The creative ability of a collection of distant and disaggregated individuals is clearly evident across a number of open-source offerings, including Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and Wikipedia, among others. In recent years, the power of co-creation has been harnessed by a number of corporations, including Ducati, General Mills, and Procter & Gamble and is being widely advocated by a number of recent business tomes, including Democratizing Innovation, Outside Innovation, and The New Age of Innovation. Clearly, customer co-creation is a hot topic and one that will likely attract increasing interest in the near future. Given its recency and the exhuberence expressed by its proponents, it is difficult to decipher the limits of this new innovation technique. Are there any realms where co-creation can't work or shouldn't be applied?

An initial look into the limits of co-creation is provided by Penguin Publishing's recently failed wiki-experiment, A Million Penguins. Essentially, Penguin experimented with the idea of co-creating a novel by applying the logic, principles, and techniques of open-source software. Penguin launched this initiative on its corporate website in early February 2007 and shut it down (due to the overwhelming volume of contributions) approximately one month later. During this brief period, nearly 1,500 authors contributed approximately 11,000 edits. Thus, from a contribution standpoint, this experiment might be considered a success. However, The finished product is a collection of 1,030 pages of chaotic and inchoate prose laden with disjointed paragraphs and a direction-less plot. Those interested in exploring what when wrong (as well as right) should check out both the brief post-mortem provided in Penguin's blog as well as a recent academic investigation of this experiment by Bruce Mason and Sue Thomas of the Institute for Creative Technologies at De Montfort University (UK). Both reports identify a number of problems with this experiment, including creative divergence among its contributors, the technological limits of the wiki-platform, and vandalism, among others. If nothing else, Penguin's experiment presents the co-creation movement with a bit of irony: Although we can write books about co-creation, co-creating a book seems beyond our limits.