Community is king for any collaboration platform or social network: outcomes are primarily a function of the participating users and any software is strictly in their service.
With this in mind, when creating new platforms we define success criteria and ask ourselves who we might attract and engage. We ask ourselves where they congregate (online or offline) and ask what might motivate them to participate.
It’s often claimed that everyone’s incentives need to be the same in any successful system. However, no communities or individuals are identical, and their needs and interests will also differ. Instead, our experience has taught us that a site’s users might have wildly differing incentives and motivations, and if you value diverse input that’s healthy.
Cash is clearly a powerful incentive but it’s not the be all and end all – just look at Wikipedia’s hundreds of thousands of unpaid contributors that have amassed over one billion human hours creating and editing contributions. These contributors certainly do not all have the same motivation to contribute – some might be editing to improve their reputation while others might use it as a learning process.
I was fortunate to go to a lecture by Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School when we began imagining OpenIDEO. He did a wonderful job of showing the range of potential incentives and motivations of different community members in this framework:
Given that we agreed inclusivity was a design principle for OpenIDEO, it followed that we should design as many of these intrinsic and extrinsic motivations into the platform as possible and that our primary job was to design a system in which they were all aligned toward the same common goal.
We made a conscious decision not to use the most extrinsic of all motivators: cash. Our conclusion was that it would compromise collaboration and misalign other motivations that would be sufficiently powerful alone.
With this framework printed large in our project space, we designed OpenIDEO to appeal to multiple incentives and motivations – not least recognition, knowledge, intellectual challenge and fun. You will see that these manifest themselves in personal profile pages and testimonials, downloadable tools and a personal ‘Design Quotient’ which is a categorization and measure of the user’s participation on the site.
More recently, as we have begun applying the OI Engine platform to Enterprises we have been pleasantly surprised at the power of these non-financial motivations in driving contributions from employees. In fact, one client’s toughest challenge when selling the platform into his international bank was in convincing the managers that prizes weren’t required to drive employee contribution and might instead compromise collaboration, he was vindicated when thousands of employees actively engaged.
Tip 2:
Who really matters.
- What community do you hope to engage?
- Where do they congregate?
- What might motivate them to participate?
- Can you design for multiple motivations?
View Tip 1 here
(reblogged from my original post on Huffington Post)
One Response to “Tip 2: Design for Multiple Motivations (from HuffPo)”
Tiago
Dear Tom,
I have been greatly inspired by your work.
I would like to create an open innovation platform for LATAM as a spin-off of my learning community (www.hookah.cl) in Chile.
I am giving it a great thought in terms of the power that in-person communities might have in LATAM, in a Meetup.com format, for example; groups to be formed around Design Challenges… Did you think of this alternative when starting OpenIDEO? What were your thoughts in regards to it (in-person innovation platforms)?
By the way, I am in the Mayo Clinic (Rochester) as I write, due to health issues. Might I connect with people at Mayo that might have worked with you in the “How might we all maintain wellbeing and thrive as we age?” challenge?
Many thanks!
Tiago
PS: Would you like to tackle the in-person open innovation platform for LATAM, with us? Would love to have you on board ;)