Crowd dynamics, Co-creation, and Values in technology innovation: a case study in robotics

In this article I am going to analyze crowd dynamics in co-creation settings (Cordella, Paletti, & Maha, 2018; Ramaswamy & Ozcan, 2018; Viscusi & Tucci, 2018). Furthermore, I am going to investigate the connection between these dynamics and the values informing or rather forming the outputs of co-creation initiatives, with a specific focus on technology innovation (Shilton, 2013; Snyder, Shilton, & Anderson, 2016; Stirling, 2007). On the one hand, the research aims to provide an understanding of how crowd dynamics eventually shape collective co-creation activities, either enabling or bounding their capacity of scaling; on the other hand, the different dimensions and perspectives on values are questioned in their difference through the shapes that co-creation practices may assume once moving from, e.g., value intensive setting of local groups and communities to a population assuming the dimension of anonymous crowd in co-creation practices characterized by seriality (Sartre, 1960; Viscusi & Tucci, 2018; Young, 1994). The theoretical arguments will be developed empirically through the analysis of the case study of a Robotics Innovation Facility (RIF) based in Italy, one of the initiatives funded by the European project ECHORD++ to provide access to businesses as well as a general audience to high-tech robotic equipment and expertise, thus eventually promoting and enabling co-creation in robotics.