“Works in Practice - But Not in Theory”
Seems to me that the above paraphrased quote about Wikipedia describes most of my research work on distributed innovation. I came across this quote while reading an article in the New York Times describing how the Wikipedia community self-organized to create the most current and updated information page on the web on the Virginia Tech massacre. The article outlines how over 2000 people participated in creating the page on Wikipedia - without any formal prior coordination or task assignment. Eric von Hippel and I are in the midst of finishing up a paper that outlines the basics of a micro-distributed innovation system using example from Open Source - but we think it will equally apply to this setting as well. Stay tuned….