Exploring the Second Innovation Web: The Socialization (Community Building) Archetype

The second innovation web archetype of relevance is the “socialization web”, which is also called the “community” web. The socialization web archetype is web archetype is a web of relationships which evolves out of the research web archetype as the research and / or innovation crystalizes and begins reaching early stage practitioners / evangelists in organizations. It consists of tangible and intangible exchanges between the researchers and / or innovators, the users, marketeers and product packagers. The research web archetype continues to “operate”.

Once the research web has been transitioned to the socialization web archetype, primarily by stabilizing its transition threshold performance and populating the new roles od Marketeer(s) and Product Packager, a new sequence of transactions emerges while the research web continues to “operate”. In a first step we see innovators and users sharing intangible stories with marketeers and product packagers about their experience and the potential of the innovation in question. In practice marketeers will typically comment on these stories first to users and  then once they have heard enough stories to the innovators. Product packagers typically require more convincing by hearing more stories before engaging. As marketeers hear more and more stories from the innovators and users they will begin to share the stories with trusted product packagers and in addition begin suggesting ideas on how the innovation might benefit the product packager (and the later market validation and commercialization webs). With sufficient input from marketeers (and of course the continuing stories from innovators) the product packager becomes curious and reaches out to the innovators to learn more about the idea in question and about what the user community looks like. Innovators will usually respond quickly to product packager inquiries with examples of their products, ideas on how the product might be used and scaled, and a significant amount of trust that the inquiry will be treated professionally. If sufficiently interested the product packager will provide intangible feedback on the product and ideally follow that with tangible structural requirements for adopting the idea into their own development roadmaps. These structural requirements begin shaping the idea / innovation into a form suitable for adult industrialization discussions. Over time the conversations will grow in intensity, especially within the product packager community, within the marketeer community, between product packagers and innovators, and between marketeers and users, and marketeers and innovators.

As with the description of the research web only key intangible and tangible exchanges and dynamics are shown, whereby the web weaver continues to facilitate / serve the innovation web in order to support maturing it to those transition threshold maturity levels which are required for transition to the next innovation web archetype: market validation.