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This chapter advances our understanding of collaborative innovation processes that span across organizational boundaries by providing an ethnographic account of idea generation dynamics in a member-initiated online songwriting community. Applying a science and technology studies perspective on processes “in the making,” the findings of this chapter reveal the generative entanglements of three processes of content-in-the-making, skill-in-the-making, and community-in-the-making that were triggered and maintained over time by temporary stabilizations of provisional, interim outcomes. These findings also elucidate interferences between these three processes, particularly when an increased focus on songs as products undermines the ongoing collaborative production of ideas. Regular interventions in the community design were necessary to simultaneously stimulate the three processes and counteract interfering tendencies that either prioritized content production, community building, or skill development, respectively. The authors conclude that firms seeking to tap into online communities’ innovative potential need to appreciate community and skill development as creative processes in their own right that have to be fostered and kept in sync with content production.

In this performance autoethnography, through a layered text with a blurred aesthetic format, which mixes life stories and academic scholarship, the author offers visceral knowledge of his encounters with Professor Denzin the person, as well as his scholarly work. How the author leaned from Denzin the possibilities to try to advance decolonizing discourses that may lead to more inclusive notions of social justice questioning the uncontrolled desire to categorize and control the Other. It is a personal narrative full of hope and love, where the author tries to demonstrate, from his arrival at the University of Illinois in August of 1999 to the present day, his deepest gratitude to his advisor, his muse. The blessing of having Denzin in his life.