Nature-inspired organizational design framework for open collaboration platform development

Kim, Sojung; Baek, Joon Sang

Over the last two decades, for-profit and non-for-profit organizations have increasingly adopted open collaboration, such as open innovation and crowdsourcing, as a strategy for innovation. Information and communication technology (ICT) has played a major role in forming open collaboration communities, but organizational design also needs to be considered to encourage the active participation and collaboration of actors. Nonetheless, organizational design aspect has seldom been addressed in developing open collaboration platforms. In this research, an organizational design framework for open collaboration was developed through a nature-inspired design approach. This framework suggests that the self-organization mechanism of social insects provides inspirations for the design of the platform, especially in terms of setting simple rules to induce behaviors of the actors and facilitating interactions among them. Since the open collaboration strategy depends on external actors who are not in employment relationship, an organization cannot force their contribution. Accordingly, the organization’s capability to induce the spontaneous participation of actors is essential, and it implies the potential role of designers in platform design based on a thorough understanding of actors. We thus claim that designers can bring a new perspective to organizational design. Open collaboration platforms serve as an exemplar in which designers contribute to the design of an organizational environment that fosters collaboration.

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