Crowd dynamics and co-creation practices in robotics innovation: an interpretive study of facilities

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the characteristics and organizing forms of facilities where the design and testing of robotics innovation happen. In particular, the paper addresses a gap in the state-of-the-art literature, which has not fully investigated the connection between those facilities, the different types of crowds involved in the design and testing of robotics innovation, and the values embedded in their outputs. To this end, this article presents a qualitative research based on two interpretive case studies of facilities and education initiatives in Italy and Switzerland. The article aims to provide a further understanding of the role of crowds in innovation, especially focusing on robotics, and to contribute to the stream of research connecting open innovation and resource-based view (RBV), by questioning how facilities for co-creation, specifically in robotics, inform the values that make both the testing sites and their outputs valuable resources. Also, the article adds its results to the corpus of studies on the collaboration between universities and firms, by highlighting organizational factors and trajectories that may eventually lead to the creation of innovation ecosystems and infrastructures.