A sociotechnical analysis of participatory innovation in firm-hosted online communities

International audienceIn the last decade, numerous books of business thinking and innovation management were published announcing the advent of a new economy of sharing (Tapscott & Williams, 2006), the openness of innovation processes (Chesbrough, 2003a, 2003b), the increasingly wide participation of customers to New Product Developement processes (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004 ; Howe, 2006). According to Chesbrough for example, a new era has already begun : « the era of Open Innovation » (Chesbrough, 2003b). Nevertheless, a literature review of these best-sellers works demonstrates that many of the examples used by the business thinkers are common to the diverse publications. Moreover, a broader study on a 1500 articles corpus extracted from Business Source Complete — around the “co-innovation” theme — shows that the companies from the primary and secondary sectors are almost absent from the case studies. So it’s important to put borders to the understanding of a phenomenon which is too often immediately perceived as global in the literature even if the practices seem far more sector-specific.This paper will be based on a thesis conducted between 2010 and 2015 on the participatory innovation in firm-hosted online communities. We will use the data collected on six web platforms launched by five companies between 2004 and 2008: Ideastorm (Dell), Lab'Orange and dream Orange (Orange), L’Atelier SFR (SFR) and La Fabrique RATP (RATP), Imagine TGV (SNCF). These data come from both interviews and online social networks analysis.We will first propose a typology of participatory innovation systems implemented by companies since the second half of the 2000s, in the wake of this evolution of the Web towards more interactive formats —and potentially participative— the so-called Web 2.0. We will distinguish the platforms open to the general public from new R&D intermediation platforms — such as InnoCentive, Nine Sigma, YourEncore, etc. — in which the innovation process is still controlled by experts.Having thus defined the scope of our study to large companies dedicated to participatory innovation with end-users, we will build our argument in two stages. First, we’ll describe the platforms as socio-technical devices made of software and organizational choices that make up, combined with the different uses from company's spokesmen and users, a “reference frame” (Flichy, 1995) for the co-innovation. Next, we will show by using our interviews and online observations, that we can distinguish three different engagement plans (“régimes d’engagement”) (Thevenot, 2006) in the online collaboration : the lead-user, the fan and the activist. This communication thus enters the first thematic focus of the conference (Practices and sociotechnical devices), since it proposes on the one hand a typology and a socio-technical analysis of co-innovation devices based on an interactionist approach to participation and on the other hand a pragmatic analysis of user involvement in collaboration with companies