Cognitive Surplus: Who has all the time to participate in co-creation? A review of Clay Shirkey's book

I just finished reading the book "Cognitive Surplus" by NYU professor Clay Shirkey. While in general I do not post book reviews here, I really liked the book as it provides a great summary of the one question I often get from people after my presentations on customer co-creation:

"Who has all the time to contribute to ... ", with "..." to be replaced by a user idea contest by a company, an open hardware project, a Wikipedia edit, a LEGO Factory hack, a long co-design session in a nice mass customization configurator.

Shirkey's answer on this question is covered in the first chapter of his book: There just is so much "cognitive surplus", i.e. all the free time we have in our recent modern society (for the first ime in the existence of mankind) and which we mostly waste for --- watching TV.

Every single year for the second half of the 20th century, the amount of television watched by humanity increased. Collectively, we now watch more than one trillion hours of television every year. US-Americans alone watch about 200 billion hours of television a year.

Just the 200bn of TV in the US represents, as Shirky notes, about 2,000 times the total human hours that have gone so far into creating Wikipedia. So just turning 1% (or even 0.1%) of the time invested into watching TV into participation already provides much capacity -- our "cognitive surplus" we can use to do something larger, more interactive and more participative than just watching TV.

At the same time, the cost for us to contribute also has dramatically been lowered thanks to the internet and devices and software helping us to interact. As a result, many new opportunities arise to participate in creativity and problem‑solving.

The remaining of the book is a nice summary of earlier literature on WHY people are motivated to participate in initiatives started by other people of commercial organizations, and often do so without demanding any monetary payment for their contributions. Here, Shirkey lays out nicely recent and older research on intrinsic and social motivation.

So, in conclusion, most arguments in the book are not new, but it provides a great review of research and a nice answer on "why the hell are people spending so much time in contributing to co-creation initiatives."

Context:

• There also is a TED talk by Shirky on the main arguments of his book.
• The book also has a website that provides the most comprehensive summary of a book on the web I ever have seen, http://www.cognitivesurplus.com

Comments

[Eduardo Castellano]

By the way, in terms of crowdsourcing resources you might also find interesting the crowdsourcing landscape edited by crowdsourcingresults.com:

http://crowdsourcingresults.com/competition-platforms/crowdsourcing-landscape-discussion/

[Eduardo Castellano]

Related recent study of Forrester Research -US Consumers Are Willing Co-Creators: “According to a survey of consumer product strategy (CPS) professionals, nearly half of all companies are not using social media to interact directly with their customers in order to influence product creation, design, or strategy. While numerous barriers may stand in their way, firms commonly ask whether consumers actually want to co-create — and if so, would they want to co-create with them? In a word, yes. Sixty-one percent of all US online adults are willing co-creators, and they are open to co-creating across a large range of industries. With such wide-ranging interest in participation, CPS professionals should feel comfortable proceeding with co-creation strategies, as chances are good that there are engaged, interested consumers who are willing to help improve your product. When creating these engagements, CPS professionals should begin by targeting consumers with whom they are already engaging on their own sites or through social media. Recognize that participation will be stronger — and the results more thorough and useful — if the interaction is appealing from the consumer’s point of view, in terms of the topic, incentive, and time commitment”.

Source: http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/us_consumers_are_willing_co-creators/q/id/57506/t/2?src=RSS_2

[Richard Wheeler]

That captures exactly how I feel! I have time to contribute to several free/open source projects (Wikipedia, OpenTTD and Instructables are the big ones) and I am sure it is because I hate watching TV!

[DesignNotebook]

An interesting thing about co-creation is the (generally) intrinsic reward system as opposed to the extrinsic reward system offered by our paying jobs.

In my limited circle, the people I know who make edits on wikipedia are more excited about that than their day jobs. On the other end of the spectrum, the people I know who love their day jobs don't do much co-creation... they are already scratching their creative itch, and getting paid for it.

Where epic societal productivity gains will be made is when co-creators get compensated to the point that they can dive real deep into these efforts.

In the meantime all we are doing is making visible gains on the back of invisible burnout.It would be interesting to see the attrition rates on cocreate contributors.

[Frank Piller]

This also is exactly one of the conclusions the book makes!

[Charles Boxenbaum]

I first must admit that I have not read the book - yet. Having said that, I believe from experience as well as observation, that most people would like to be associated with something good and well-done. If you give people that opportunity, I think that often they will take it without any additional compensation or even compensation at all just to be associated with something that they think is "good". I don't know whether it is a social imperative or a genetic one, but I have witnessed this over and over. Clearly people think this new way of creating has the potential to do "good" and if it's not too hard to do it, why not? Perhaps this is the answer to "why the hell...people are spending so much time..."