Collective intelligence, crowd dynamics, and co-creation: preliminary insights from a case study in Robotics Innovation Facilities (RIFs)

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.