Paper to be presented at the 25th Celebration Conference 2008 on
ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND INNOVATION - ORGANIZATIONS, INSTITUTIONS, SYSTEMS AND REGIONS Copenhagen, CBS, Denmark, June 17 - 20, 2008
PLAYFUL TECHNOLOGIES: CREATIVITY, INNOVATION AND ORGANIZATION Mark Dodgson University of Queensland
[email protected] David Gann Tanaka Business School
[email protected] Catelijne Coopmans Tanaka Business School
[email protected]
Abstract: This paper addresses the relationships between creativity, innovation and organization by drawing on theories of play and examining their significance for the use of new innovation technologies in IBM. It contends that by doing so it deepens our understanding of the emerging role of technology in facilitating innovation in the under-researched services sector. By analyzing some central features of play and describing IBM's use of new technologies, such as Virtual Worlds, the paper explores some management and organizational challenges confronting the more productive use of technology to encourage creativity and innovation.
JEL - codes: A2, -, -
Playful technologies: creativity, innovation and organization Paper prepared for DRUID’s 25th Anniversary conference, June 2008. Theme L: Creativity, Experimentation and Organization 1. Introduction Working creatively in a knowledge economy increasingly entails absorbing large and diverse amounts of information and turning it into new opportunities for innovation. As a result technology has become an indispensable tool for those dealing in information, such as financial traders and journalists, and for those making and delivering things, such as designers and engineers. Across many sectors and industries, organizational activities associated with R&D, design, innovation and strategic renewal have been ‘informated’ (Zuboff 1988), in particular through the use of digital technologies for modelling, simulating, prototyping and visualizing – technologies that have been described as ‘innovation technologies’ (IvT) (Dodgson, Gann and Salter 2005). The ways in which such technologies contribute to creativity and innovation is beginning to be explored in the innovation and organization literature. For example, Becker et al. (2005) examined problem solving enabled by virtual simulation tools in the context of new product development. Thomke (1998) analysed the relationship between virtual and real experimentation. D’Adderio (2001) investigated how digital prototypes support the integration of heterogeneous sources and types of knowledge for new product definition. Dodgson, Gann and Salter (2007) explored the way simulation technology supports innovation in inter-organizational projects. This research goes some way in addressing the trialling and testing of products, processes, services, business options and marketplaces in virtual space, and how this enables integration across organizations, professions and disciplines, mitigates uncertainty and helps identify trade-offs between options and choices. However, we contend that current research does not fully capture the emerging role of IvTs, and especially digital visualisation technologies, in creativity and innovation processes in service firms. As service firms comprise such large components of developed economies, and are the locus of increasing investments in innovation, this is considered an important and under-attended area of research. This paper engages with play theory as a valuable resource for deepening our understanding of the emerging role of technology in facilitating innovation in services. Building on previous work (Dodgson, Gann et al. 2005, 2007) and providing a case study of IBM’s use of IvT, the aim of the article is to specify what kinds of play are facilitated with these technologies and how these are significant in the way companies organize for creativity as part of their innovation processes. We argue that innovation may be to technology what play is to work: a possibility to break free through prescribed, controlled environments and offer a temporary relaxation of rules in order to explore new alternatives.
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IvT is used right across the innovation process, but our focus here is on those technologies that involve collaborative exploration of and experimentation with new ideas presented in computerized, visual forms. The paper is structured as follows: we start with a discussion of some of the major organizational challenges commonly faced by innovative companies in all sectors. We then turn to the relationship between creativity and play, referring particularly to the work of Johan Huizinga and James March. In the following section we describe playful technologies and the specific economic and strategic context in which they are used. A case study of IBM’s use of these technologies is then presented to demonstrate how the use of modern visualisation techniques supporting innovation activities can be understood as play. We conclude the paper by outlining some of the implications of our findings for the relationships between creativity, innovation and organization. 2. Organization and innovation Innovation, the successful application of new ideas, is recognized as an important source of competitive advantage: it is the lifeblood of all organizations. Empirical study of the relationship between innovation and organization has a long history, going back to Woodward (1965) and Burns and Stalker (1961). The key organizational challenge lies in being receptive to innovation opportunities without disrupting the efficiencies and productivity achieved in running a normal state of affairs. This perennial question for organization and innovation is balancing the tension identified by March (1991) of the need to simultaneously ‘exploit’ and ‘explore’. It has implications for the structure and organization of firms, teams and networks. For example, centralized organizational structures are argued to restrict external inputs to creativity and innovation and encourage the ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome leading to introspection. Decentralized structures are argued to ignore the longer-term investments necessary for major breakthroughs. Firms are using new forms of projectbased organization that help overcome the disadvantages for creativity and innovation of centralized and decentralized structures (Davies and Hobday, 2005). The management literature also proposes the idea of the ‘ambidextrous’ organization, with parts focusing on operational efficiency in established areas of business (e.g., front offices and operations), and others seeking new business and technological opportunities. The separation of two distinct groups with different structures, incentives and cultures within the same organization is fraught with difficulties, and many companies have experimented with isolated teams (skunkworks), semisanctioned periods of individual experimentation (bootlegging), and fully sanctioned routines allowing ‘free’ time for the pursuit of innovative projects (Dodgson, Gann and Salter, 2008). Challenges abound in managing the balance of innovative teams: the need for established working practices and procedures, organizational learning and trust, versus the need for team refreshment and dissonant voices. Teams that work together for extended periods gain certain efficiencies but also become conservative, autarkic, reliant on limited knowledge sets and fail to learn from external sources (Katz and
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Allen 1982). Similarly, within networks, to overcome the problems of institutional isomorphism – the more organizations work together, the more they come to resemble one another (Dimaggio and Powell, 1983) – there is a need to work with dissimilar organizations. Hence the ‘collaboration paradox’: the need to partner with organizations that are the most difficult to collaborate with (Dodgson, 1993). Firms that work too closely with their customers and suppliers have been shown to become blind to the dangers and opportunities of disruptive technologies (Christensen, 1997). Even in firms that accept that they must innovate to survive, new ideas often fail to be explored because they suffer from internal ‘illegitimacy’ (Dougherty and Heller 1994). Managers may have the intention to be innovative, but in practice find themselves unable to imagine how this fits with continuing work (Dougherty 2001). Bringing new technologies in does not automatically provide the answer: more often than not such technologies become assimilated with existing practices before their capacity to underpin new ways of working becomes recognized and legitimate (Yates 1999). In practice technologies are “localized,” that is, they are made part of the local work routine of a group and this needs to be taken into account when trying to explain a change in organizational structure (Barley 1986) or practices (Berg 1997). We contend that these organizational challenges – balancing exploration and exploitation through effective structures, teams and networks, and ensuring the legitimacy of new approaches – can be newly understood and managed through a focus on play. Such a focus helps illuminate the role of digital technologies that enrich the infrastructure for innovation in organizations by encouraging the flow of new ideas within and between firms. 3. Creativity and Play There is considerable interest in the role of creativity in the innovation process with a number of strands of research in areas such as social psychology and cognition (Gardner 2006; Boden 2004), organization and team-working (Dougherty and Takacs 2004), and strategies for firms to improve innovative performance (Amabile 1996, 1998). These interests have a general theme in common, namely: how can creativity be understood, supported and harnessed to enable higher quality innovations in products, processes and services. The relationship between creativity and processes, cultures and behaviours that enhance the way people experiment and play with new ideas is itself a focal point within this field (Mainemelis and Ronson 2006). The notion of ‘serious play’ has been identified as a significant issue for the strategic development of firms (Schrage 2000). Many of the essential elements of play are captured in Johan Huizinga’s 1955 (original 1938) book: Homo Ludens. Play, he argues, is at once beautiful, fun and captivating and at the same time rule-bound, order-creating and tension-ridden. Play “creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection” (p29). It occurs outside of real life and is essentially freedom-based… “all play is a voluntary activity. Play to order is no longer play; it could at best be but a forcible imitation of it” (p26). Tension arises due to uncertainty and chanciness and the striving to decide issues.
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Huizinga contributes to our understanding of what today we would refer to as play in the virtual world. Play is “a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding” (p32). It “is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporal sphere of activity with a disposition of its own” (p26). Joint participation in play brings “the feeling of being ‘apart together’ in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important” (p31). March (1976) develops this notion of play to counter what he sees as the limiting consequences of rational choice. He argues… “In the theory of childhood, we emphasize choices as leading to experiences that develop the child’s scope, his complexity, his awareness of the world… In the theory of adulthood, we emphasize choices as a consequence of our intentions…” (p73) To encourage ‘interesting’ people and organizations, he contends, the model of children is better… “…they need to supplement the technology of reason with a technology of foolishness” (p75). Indeed, “A strict insistence on purpose, consistency, and rationality limits our ability to find new purposes”; whereas “Play relaxes that insistence to allow us…to explore alternative ideas or possible purposes and alternative concepts…” (p77). Resonating strongly with Huizinga, March notes the following features of play; it: - is the deliberate, temporary relaxation of rules in order to explore the possibilities of alternative rules; - allows experimentation. At the same time it encourages reason; - is an instrument of intelligence rather than self-indulgence; - is a functional complement, and often a behavioural competitor, to reason, which poses numerous challenges of matching alternative styles and orientations in the same organization. He argues that managers are likely to overlook the importance of play, but “the design of organizations should attend to the problems of maintaining both playfulness and reason as aspect of intelligent choice”. And “We encourage organizational play by permitting (and insisting on) some temporary relief from control, coordination, and communication” (p80/81). Given the inherent tensions between playfulness and directed purpose identified in the literature it is revealing that Jazz improvisation is one of the most common recent metaphors used in the organization and management literature to reflect this appreciation of the challenging nature of play (see the Special Edition of Organization Science on ‘Jazz Improvisation and Organizing’: 1998). Jazz improvisation provides an idiom for understanding the balance in the relationship between individuals as they collectively explore the unexpected within the confines of accepted styles and structures. As Weick (1998) points out, jazz reflects the way that effective improvisation, seen as spontaneous experiment, actually reflects depth of experience and degrees of discipline by its players. It exploits existing styles whilst exploring
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new ones. This musical idiom is used very practically by IBM in its ‘InnovationJam’, designed to seek innovative ideas from tens of thousands of its staff, their families, and company stakeholders (see discussion below). 4. Playful technologies and innovation in services Many of the aspects of play discussed above have enormous resonance with individual and collective computer-based games playing, which is itself a major industry (Sapsed, Grantham et al. 2007). They are also widely assisted and enabled in the workplace by a new form of technology that helps place some of the processes of creativity and innovation in a virtual space to support design, engineering and development activities. This technology tends to have a visual component through which cognition, communication and participation are engaged. Visualisations can include representations of scientific findings, virtual prototyping of new products and services, and the environment for shared developmental experiences in virtual worlds such as Second Life. The creation and manipulation of images, models and animations, and the interaction with and around such visuals is a central aspect of the development of science and technology. Kemp (2000) argues that visualisations have played a key role in the development of science since the Renaissance, and major innovators, such as Edison and Poincare, have relied upon the manipulation of sketches and images to develop and share their ideas. He contends the uses of visualisations are part of the human condition… “Our pleasure in pattern, in symmetry, in order and its judicious breaking…provides a system of gratification and reward (p2). Our contention is that new technologies enhance the organisational relevance and impact of this rich history of drawing and model-making. As Kemp (2000:9) contends about the process of visualisation and the role of the computer: “The very epitome of process is embodied in the computer – a tool which has insinuated its own kind of aesthetic into our visual lives through graphic programmes.” Technology supports creativity, experimentation and play in a variety of ways (Schrage 2000; Thomke 2003; Dodgson, Gann and Salter 2005), including facilitating connections between actors in the innovation process. The major premise of approaches such as open innovation (Chesbrough 2003) and the ‘democratization’ of innovation (von Hippel 2005), and their antecedents in the work of Rothwell (1992), is substantial connectivity, encouraging the flow of ideas between various contributors to innovation. Innovation technology enables much of the collaboration and sharing between contributors, whether these are all part of one innovation team within the same company or emerge from a much larger population of developers and users. These technologies are used within an economic and social context associated with a shift away from manufacturing industries to services in developed economies. Innovation in services is being stimulated by the need to improve value, quality and experience in their consumption and to increase productivity and profitability in their
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supply. Service providers such as IBM are searching for techniques to improve productivity in service delivery drawing on lessons from automation and operational performance improvement in the manufacturing sector (Bessant and Davies 2007). This is leading to approaches such as the development of integrated solutions (Davies et al 2003), and service platforms (Gawer and Cusumano 2002). The use of technology to support innovation in services is set in an environment of increasing costs of experimentation and research, where reductions in the cost of developing and prototyping new ideas are constantly being sought (Dodgson, Gann and Salter 2006; Gann and Dodgson 2007). Service providers tend to focus on business model innovation with technological innovation usually being left to suppliers of technical infrastructure upon which services are delivered. As Bruce Tether notes, it is more difficult to develop new services ‘offline’ than it is to develop new products. New products are usually developed away from existing operations by R&D, technical support and marketing teams, which may interact with the science-base in using new materials, instruments and designs, prototyping and testing prior to introduction. New services are typically developed much closer to existing operations, making prototyping and evaluation more difficult. This may explain why product development can sometimes go through a series of step changes, or generations followed by stability once a dominant design has manifested, whereas services are more likely to evolve through incremental improvement and gradual changes in use. Service providers are therefore more likely to be locked-in to existing operations and organizational arrangements due to their commitments and focus on day-to-day delivery, hindering opportunities to explore new market needs and scientific breakthroughs. Service innovation is sometimes likened to the software development process because it is in ‘perpetual beta’ mode (Tether 2006). As Irving Wladawsky-Berger, previous Vice President Technology and Innovation at IBM, puts it: “What is the key difference between managing and innovating in "classic" physical engineering areas like the automobile industry, versus managing and innovating in a non-physical area like business and organizations? The model I have is that developing a product like a car, say - you go through well-defined phases of 1. formulating strategy and requirements; 2. design and simulation; 3. manufacturing and bringing to market; and 4. operations and maintenance. When you are doing the next product - car you start with 1 again. However, with a business, and organization, a service - you are never done with any of the phases, as they all circle with each other. Phase 4 leads back to phase 1. You are in perpetual strategy formulation, perpetual design, perpetual development and perpetual operations. In that sense, the process looks more like biology than classic engineering, in that the system or organism keeps evolving and adapting to new environmental - that is market conditions.”
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The development of virtual worlds environments such as Second Life and new collaboration environments akin to MySpace might provide the means to unlock service innovation by providing a virtual environment for creating and prototyping ideas that breaks with the strict division between production and consumption activity found in many services. They provide the potential for breaking down the organisational challenges of innovation discussed earlier. Experiments with the use of virtual worlds, like Second Life, are increasingly becoming a venue and mechanism for connecting designers, marketers, scientists and engineers for innovation in services. Virtual worlds have largely emerged using PCs as platforms, spurred by the computer games industry. They are also suitable for TV broadcast and mobile phones. A key to their future development lies in interoperability, for example, an architect designing a home would be able to draw in colours, lighting, furniture from different suppliers into the same virtual space. Virtual Worlds are very powerful mechanisms for learning. Kemp (2000:178) contends “… a theory that purports to explain how something works acquires a different status when it can be visualised as a working model”. And Gardner (2006), argues that “an increasing proportion of (the) education (of professionals) will be carried out in the future via simulations or other virtual realities”. They have the capacity to represent immense amounts of data, often produced in real time. This knowledge can be fed into virtual worlds and decisions can be reached there that can be fed back into real worlds. Virtual worlds thus become operations centres for decision-making, encouraging the rapid flow of knowledge to assist the perpetual inputs and connections required of service innovation. The technologies we are discussing therefore have the capacity to create innovation, by facilitating exploration across boundaries and virtual prototyping, and deliver innovative services. 5. IBM’s playful technologies1 Context IBM is a notable case of a service innovator using innovation technologies. Over the past decade IBM has gone through one of the most extensive and successful reconfigurations in corporate history: it has essentially redefined itself as a service provider rather than a manufacturer (Gerstner 2002). It has relied on networks and external alliances to realize this strategy (Dittrich, Duysters and de Man 2007). It continues to confront the Marchian tension of balancing exploration and exploitation. As one senior engineer and IBM Fellow puts it: “Within IBM it is sometimes hard to think disruptive thoughts, because customers want us to keep delivering more of the same. If a product makes money, how much do you allow yourself to divert?... You don’t want to confuse your customers”.
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See Appendix 1 for a discussion of the research methods used for this study. 7
IBM is using IvT to help address its challenges. According to Irving WladawskyBerger… “I believe that IBM's intranet - w3.ibm.com, Notes, and related platforms may very well be the largest social networking and collaborative use of IvT's in industry. IBM is totally dependent on them for the work we do. I believe that the fact that we are so used to these collaborative technologies and platforms has made it natural to explore virtual worlds as an extension of IvT's.” Use of the technology needs to be considered in the context of the company’s extensive exploration efforts and attempts to seek novel and disruptive innovation, seen in the following examples of searching for ideas amongst staff, with clients, and with universities. IBM has been undertaking simultaneous brainstorming sessions amongst its research labs around the world for a number of years, searching for new ideas. They worked so well that in 2006, the company asked all its employees worldwide to post their ideas on how IBM’s technologies could be applied to problem solving, in a bid to identify new market opportunities for the firm. In all, over a 72-hour period, more than 150,000 people from 104 countries contributed to the ‘InnovationJam’. Apart from IBM employees, family members, universities, business partners, and clients from 67 companies contributed more than 46,000 ideas. These ideas were clustered, judged, and refined, and eventually ten top ideas were identified, with a mixture of short-, medium- and long-term time horizons. IBM has dedicated a budget of $100 million over two years to pursuing the ten business opportunities, and appointed a VicePresident to oversee their progress. IBM’s Chairman and CEO, Sam Palmisano, in speaking about the ‘Jam’, said that ‘Collaborative innovation models require you to trust the creativity and intelligence of your employees, your clients and other members of your innovation network… [and they] are greatly accelerating our ability to innovate’ (IBM Press Release: 14th November, 2006). This approach represents a ‘playful’ relaxation of formal rules for seeking ideas: suggestions are judged on their merit rather than their source. The company’s service orientation is seen in the four major fields identified by InnovationJam (see www.collaborationjam.com): ‘going places’ – transforming travel, transportation, recreation and entertainment; ‘finance and commerce’ – changing the nature of global business and commerce; ‘staying healthy’ – the science and business of well-being; and ‘better planet’ – balancing economic and environmental priorities. The role of virtual technologies is core to many of these fields. So, for example, to quote from the ‘going places’ site: “The on-line world is opening a window for mobility, allowing us to experience and inhabit “places” that exist only virtually: the immersive universe of digital entertainment, synthetic worlds and global communities.” Although it says the ‘opportunities to deliver new virtual experiences abound”, there are also challenges…
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“Virtual experiences present their own challenges, including a deluge of choices, content and formats, and no single model for how best to access, purchase or profit from it all. Foremost among the concerns of experience providers: aligning the characteristics of digital space (ubiquitous availability of content or the persistence of digital footprints, for instance) with the realities of so-called normal space (ownership of created material, or the desire for privacy, for example).” IBM explores ways of connecting and integrating its capabilities with the skills of its customers. An example of how IBM combined assets to deliver new services can be seen in the UK car insurance market. Formerly Norwich Union, Aviva is a large UK based insurance firm and long-time IBM customer. It faces fierce competition in its UK car insurance division. To gain advantage in this market, it sought to develop a new type of insurance based on the ‘pay as you drive’ philosophy. Instead of paying a yearly fee typical of car insurance, drivers pay for each mile they drive in the course of the year. This product would be attractive to intermittent car users, who would also be the least likely to have an accident, partly because they would likely be within an age group that had fewer accidents. Working with technologists at IBM, Aviva piloted an electronic system to measure the position, speed, and direction of over 5,000 private cars over a two-year period. This system logged the position of each car every second of the journey and the information was plotted on a map, reporting more easily comprehensible information than lists of data. This information was used to calculate the premium for customers based on usage. By combining Aviva’s know how of insurance and IBM’s technical ability, Aviva was able to create a new distinctive service. The added advantage of this system is that it allows Aviva to target its offering to the part of the market that is least likely to make a claim, thereby attracting valuable customers and reducing the market of low risk individuals for competitors. The ‘pay as you drive’ service was launched in the UK in early 2007. The company’s efforts to explore new relationships with universities is seen in its championing of the ‘Services Science Manufacturing and Engineering Initiative’ (SSME). IBM is being supported in this by major businesses, such as Hewlett Packard, British Telecom, BAe Systems and Rolls Royce, some of which have always been service businesses, but others have only recently diversified into them. Through SSME IBM and others are calling for a reorientation of scientific effort, to include much greater inter- trans- and multi-disciplinary work. In particular, they see potential for economically valuable research into service systems that requires studies at the interface of disciplines focused on the following four things: business and management (e.g., operations and innovation management, marketing, human resource management, etc.); technology as a resource (e.g., science, technology and engineering); people as a resource (e.g., social and behavioural sciences, including economics, sociology and anthropology, psychology); and information as a resource (e.g., information systems and informatics) (see Cambridge University and IBM, 2007, for details). Given its recent development, the results from this initiative are too early to observe. IBM has had a long engagement with the computer art community, seen in its support for William Latham, the famous computer-generated sculptor. Latham spent 6 years at IBM’s Hursley research centre in the UK creating a design tool called ‘Mutator’ in
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which sculptural forms are endowed with genetic properties that shape their growth. Latham went on to found several successful computer games companies. Visualisation technologies It is within this context that Virtual Worlds are being developed to organize teams and networks to encourage creativity and innovation. Virtual worlds are seen as an important emerging business opportunity for IBM. Their use emerged in a small group in the company’s UK Hursley laboratory in 2006 and by 2007 this community of users had reached 5000. A number of Virtual Worlds are used within IBM, including Second Life (which was developed by Linden Research Inc and launched in 2003), but there is no attempt to prescribe the use of any particular platform. An immediate benefit of using Virtual Worlds is overcoming the limitations of existing technologies for communicating. Teleconferencing imposes a physical restriction on the number of people who can participate. Virtual worlds can create appropriate spaces for the purpose of the discussion, ie a formal boardroom or meeting room with Powerpoint presentations, a comfortable lounge, or sitting around a log fire. They can create a shared environment where disparate contributors can operate with the sense described by Huizinga of being ‘apart together’. Within IBM it is estimated that the first 5 minutes of a teleconference is spent ‘joining’ and waiting for others, and with 330,000 staff undertaking extensive teleconferencing this adds up to 9.4 person years wasted weekly. In virtual worlds people immediately begin to talk to others they know. Virtual world meetings have the capacity to convey more human signals and engage in richer environments than teleconferencing. They provide spaces where new people can join. They allow people to express themselves by waving their hands up and down, and hand things to one another. They create an environment where people’s representations of themselves as avatars in a community create a sense of sharing something important. As one IBM engineer put it “virtual meetings can be engineered to create serendipitous events…”. The rapid growth in the use of Virtual Worlds is believed to reflect their usefulness and, after the common frustrations of an initial set-up period, the fun and enjoyment they convey. An example of the way IvT is evolving in IBM is seen in the convergence of Bluegrass and Jazz: an exercise in taking software for collaboration and adding virtual environments. Jazz is a joint project between IBM Rational and IBM Research to build a team collaboration platform for integrating tasks across the software life cycle. Jazz is designed essentially to help people work together to build software more effectively. Bluegrass, developed by IBM Research, Cambridge, is a Virtual World for collaborative software development using Jazz. It is a Jazz plug-in that provides a virtual world where developers can meet online, discuss their work, and collaboratively create designs for their projects. Elements of the world include visualisations, meeting rooms, and virtual design documents linked to Jazz artefacts. Another example of IBM’s technology in this space is Innov8, an interactive, 3-D educational game. It is based on commercial gaming technologies and allows players to visualize how technology and related business strategy affect different parts of the organization. According to the IBM wiki… “users can literally see business processes, identify bottlenecks, and explore ‘what if’ scenarios before the technology is deployed”. It is a business process management simulator that uses real IBM
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experiences to provide users with an understanding of the lifecycle of discovery, collaboration and optimization. Initially it was piloted by 25 North American universities, but from 6th November 2007 was available for download for 2000 universities around the world. IBM builds on these experiences when it engages in consultancy projects on the deployment of virtual worlds for other companies. For example, it worked with Diageo, the drinks company, to design digital workspaces to be used by globally dispersed R&D teams. ‘Matching the mood of the meeting’ is central to this effort, and is a means to inject different degrees of playfulness into different types of meetings. In the brainstorming area, members of the team are encouraged to type up any idea they may have, which will form a bubble that floats around in the space. The next colleague who enters can assess the idea and click on it if s/he likes it. This makes the bubble grow bigger, thus attracting more attention from the other colleagues who enter the space. Diageo R&D also uses virtual quiet spaces where the pace and mechanisms for the exchange of ideas are quite different. The legitimation of play and use of IvT remains a challenging issue. At the overall level of the community of technology users, there needs to be collaboration over community standards of what is and is not acceptable. Reconciliation is required in the tension between openness and ownership. Within the firm, there is a need to legitimate exploration so people can be apart together in a manner productive and useful for the individual and the organization. IBM’s approach of having its CEO speaking inside a metaverse, is believed to have made a big difference in internal acceptability and popularity of the medium. The substantial corporate endorsement and support of the internal champions of this technology, the so-called “Metaverse Evangelists”, is further illustration of this legitimization process. Interestingly, Diageo’s virtual world development team held off such CEO participation, because they felt the time was not right for it; they wanted the organizational structure around the virtual space to develop organically rather than mimic the formal structure of the organization. This illustrates that different legitimization strategies may be appropriate in different circumstances. Technology is simply an artefact, useless without imagination, skills, organization and purposeful application. It may facilitate and enable play, but its most creative use will lie in the exploration of individuals and groups unbounded and unfettered by restrictive organizational discipline. Order derives more from the rules in the game – in this case the capacities of the technology - rather than decisions on how the game is to be played. Although IBM has recently developed its Virtual World Guidelines, advising staff how to conduct themselves when they are interacting virtually, it claims it remains keen not to restrict the excitement it engenders and ‘does not want to act like a sheriff” (USA Today, 26/7/07). It is attempting to legitimate its use by developing appropriate norms of behaviour. 6. Discussion Where companies have managed to weave the use of digital technologies into the fabric of their innovation activities, they have provided their employees with opportunities to play with the ideas at the core of the business. This is especially important in service innovation, where there is the need for ‘perpetual interaction’. In
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the context of creativity and innovation, play means, amongst other things, the safety and confidence of being ‘apart together’, the deliberate relaxation of rules to explore possible alternatives, and the construction of a temporary sphere of activity to provide relief from control and coordination to enable exploration. For such activities to emerge, companies have to introduce technologies at the same time as determine where such play is most useful and how it can be embedded in cultures of management and accountability that encourage and legitimate, rather than stifle, playfulness at work. Drawing together our earlier discussion of play and visualisation technologies, and the organisational challenges of innovation, Table 1 describes some of the major features of the relationships between technology, organisation and play. We shall discuss three of the challenges that emerge. Table 1 – Technology, Organisation and Play Features of Play
Safety of being ‘apart together’
Deliberate relaxation of rules
Features of visualisation technology
Cheap, accessible, virtual space for communication and exploration Virtual Worlds, Metaverse Evangelists Encouragement and legitimization of exploration across boundaries
Range of hardware and software platforms in use
Examples from IBM Management and Organisational Challenges
InnovationJam, Virtual World Guidelines Relinquishing control over selection and use of technology. Facilitating time for play whilst establishing normative patterns of behaviour
Temporary sphere of activity to enable experimentation Fun, resonant of games playing Innov8, Bluegrass/Jazz Constructing organisational forms (projects, teams) encouraging radical innovation in ambidextrous organisations
First, if it is the case that in IBM and other companies play has become the driver that gels together communities of innovators, then a playful view of innovation needs to underpin the mechanisms for managing such communities. This may include relinquishing control over the networks employees choose to be a part of, and their efforts to establish a credible and significant presence within these networks. Some companies have proven very uncomfortable with staff using new technologies, such as Facebook and Second Life and have banned their use during office hours. Others, such as Diageo, a customer of IBM, have embraced it. Diageo has given all its R&D team members avatar start-up kits, wikis and blogs. Dele Atanda of Diageo lists the following benefits to have emerged since using digital workspaces: • •
better connected and productive teams; greater engagement and social interaction (people will go to the meeting early and hang around afterwards)
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new creativity and ways of working; immersive knowledge bank (not just a library or book); • enthused teams; • potential travel and carbon footprint reduction (notes from Virtual Worlds Forum, 24 October 2007) •
The Group VP and Chief of Research at Gartner argues that virtual worlds can help bring back a team identity analogous to physical shared space (Virtual Worlds Forum, London, 24 October 2007), and within IBM it is believed working in virtual worlds helps “smooth out connections and relationships”. Allowing people time out from the achievement of pre-set tasks to work on their own projects is an obvious way of introducing play in the work context, and many companies, such as Google, encouraging free time for the pursuit of own projects, have introduced these kinds of arrangements. In March’s terms the technology of foolishness needs to complement the technology of reason. In such organisations there may be a greater concern for determining broadly defined outcomes, rather than narrowly defined outputs. However, we also need to bear in mind the tendency for ‘time out’ to become ‘overtime’, and the extent to which time out is governed by expectations about performance. If people are given time out to play, but subsequently have to account for that time and demonstrate that it was ‘well-spent’, a problem occurs. If accountability is too tight and people are not allowed to fail or achieve less quantifiable results then it becomes difficult to get full value from the use of digital technologies. Huizinga’s warning that play should be voluntary and not instructed, points to the difficulties in using conventional management practices. Maybe play time should be just that: time people do not need to account for. Whether it adds value can still be assessed through bottom-line performance figures, without probing precisely how. Such a form of accountability, which sees play as part of a whole set of work activities and does not seek to hold it to account separately, may be called ‘black box’ accountability. Acceptance of such procedures is, of course, enormously challenging and will depend upon managers’ appreciation of the value of play and its legitimization within a broader organisational culture. Second, it is important that the people who work with digital technologies for simulation, prototyping and advanced visualisation themselves are given sufficient room to see this work as play. Play scholars who have studied play behaviors in animals and humans have argued that the metacommunication used to signal to others that ‘this particular gesture, movement or remark is play’ is one of the defining features of play activity. Humans have complex verbal, gestural and contextual signals to separate play from other activities (Bateson 1956). The use of ‘locational clues’ in virtual worlds to encourage particular types of interaction in certain spaces may help to bracket off a space for play: a conversation around a fire on the beach has a different feel from a meeting in the board room. The name and physical appearance of an avatar give important clues about the role and identity of the person behind it: a certain playfulness in the design of these attributes may be vital to establish credibility in a particular community of innovators. The challenge for managers is to recognize, sanction and protect the degree to which playfulness or play signals can be freely deployed.
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Third, whether and how companies harness digital technologies for innovation depends to a large extent on the context in which play is useful for the organisation. For IBM, it is clear that in some cases the process of building a virtual platform is the innovation, not the output per se. Given the nature of innovation in the service sector, playfulness is at a premium. IBM’s use of IvT has to be seen in the context of its strategic positioning as a services company with a lengthy and extensive history of selling innovations. A key aspect of this strategic element of using IvT is its use in developing more radical, rather than incremental, innovations, an issue ripe for future research. The ways that IvT enables the visualisation of new models in our minds is particularly important for new and potentially disruptive innovations, rather than incremental problem solving. With incremental innovations, problems are usually reasonably well defined, and the tools and techniques of solving them are well known and generally available. When framing new problems or concepts the challenges are usually broad and interdisciplinary. It is here where the capacities of visualisation technologies are most beneficial. IvT is therefore a highly strategic component of a firm’s technological investments. It may contribute furthermore to the overall strategy of the firm. Farjoun argues that “internal contradiction, experimentation, flexibility, redundancy and imitation are largely incompatible with the structural approach [to strategy, represented by Michael Porter and others],” (Farjoun 2007: 204). In periods of flux, of transition, what emerges is a “classic tension [...] between the static efficiency needed to excel in a particular trajectory and the dynamic efficiency required for a transformation and redirection to take place.” (Farjoun 2007: 203). Experimentation, he argues, is a feature of the latter realm and is discussed as one of the potential critical success factors in firms’ encounter of the uncertainty and variety that characterises transition periods. An alternative is differential change, whereby the firm retains some commitments and uses experimentation to adapt other elements, resonating with the concept of the ‘ambidextrous organisation’. Both strategies are assisted in their implementation by the digital technological infrastructure we have described. Conclusions The capacities of new forms of visualisation within IvT are still being developed and their impact upon organisational choices and performance still being enacted. They provide an opportunity to enhance the playfulness of organisations to promote innovation. They are literally the technology of foolishness inasmuch as they allow experimentation in ideas and organisational structures in ways usually prescribed or prevented by extant routines. As they continue to develop, perhaps the greatest challenge for organisations and the individuals using them is the capacity to merge real and virtual worlds. Irving Wladawsky-Berger refers to "Hybrid Worlds", where there is a continuum of purely physical experiences and purely virtual experiences. “At some level, we live our lives that way today. Good novels, paintings and films create such virtual worlds in our minds. If someone lives their life vicariously through novels and films we would make a similar criticism and urge them to "get a life," go to pubs, plays and restaurants; fall physically in love with a physical person, and so on.
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What is new now is that we can make our virtual worlds as close as we want to the physical worlds they are supposed to bring to our mind. So, the transition between them should be smoother than it has been, especially where the virtual world was mostly text based. I would expect that a big part of (future research) should involve understanding this spectrum between virtual and physical worlds and what the right balance would be for different activities at different times for different people”. This recognition of the differences in individual (and organisational) responses to these new technologies reflects the inevitable conflicts and negotiations surrounding their development and use (Dodgson, Gann and Salter 2007). There is a world of difference between seeing and knowing. The capacity to represent or visualize an issue or problem facilitates, but does not inevitably lead to its greater, understanding. The management and organisational challenges of using technology playfully to encourage creativity and innovation will remain a significant research domain.
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Appendix 1 Research method The method used in research for this paper adopted an inductive approach based on extensive engagement with empirical material and conceptual frames developed by our industrial collaborator, IBM. This form of ‘engaged scholarship’ (Van de Ven 2007) involved iterative development of research questions, beginning with basic exploration of IBM’s approach to innovation in services. IBM staff revealed their own questions about the nature of service innovation and how this might be improved with a two-fold focus of developing new types of services and on increasing productivity and performance in existing service delivery. These discussions were held during preliminary meetings with two IBM Chief Technology Officers responsible for messaging and internet applications, and in three workshops involving our research team and IBM employees on 23 July 2007, 15 October 2007 and 5 November 2007. One of us attended the first pan-European business conference on Virtual Worlds in London in October 2007. IBM was represented at this conference alongside other companies using and consulting on the use of virtual worlds for marketing and corporate collaboration. We also corresponded by email with the two aforementioned IBM Chief Technology Officers. One of us was appointed to a Royal Society Taskforce on Innovation in Services and to a Royal Academy of Engineering Taskforce on IT in competitiveness, where ideas about the role of technology to enable innovation in services was a central focus of discussion. Ideas from these panels, together with our notes from the workshops and other engagements, fed into the development of this paper. The authors corresponded regularly over the interpretation of data and its analysis. We are now in the process of further developing detailed questions for semi-structured interviews as part of our continuing research into IBM. The current paper has been through five drafts and comments have been received from our industrial collaborators at IBM.
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