Flash Collabs: Collaborative Innovation Networks in Online Communities of Animators

Collaborative innovation networks (COINs) and swarm creativity is often studied in a professional business context. We propose that studying COINs of amateurs and non-business contexts provides a crucial and complementary perspective on these phenomena. By broadening the scope of COINs research to encompass these edge cases, we can begin to identify patterns and trends that persist across different contexts. For the past three years, we have been studying COINs in a novel context: online communities of Flash animators who collaborate over the internet to create animated movies and games called “collabs.” From a quantitative analysis of nearly 900 collabs on Newgrounds.com, we found that these projects can be highly successful, attracting hundreds of thousands of Internet audience members to download the completed animations. Our analysis also demonstrated that is possible to predict the success potential of a collab by examining specific factors, including attributes of the leader, organizational structures, and activity patterns within a collab.