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Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore the orientations of consumer and company participants who participate in online crowd-sourced communities.

Methodology/Approach – Using a netnographic approach, we analysed the Nokia Design by Community (NDbC) crowd-sourced information contest, which was organised by Nokia in order to co-create a vision of the community's ‘dream’ Nokia device.

Findings – The findings reveal that community members' social orientations were dramatically different from the host organisation's narrow commercial focus, which led to unresolved tensions and as we posit, the ultimate failure of the initiative.

Research implications – The contemporary discourse on collaborative value co-creation potentially overemphasises the commercial objectives of organisations by failing to acknowledge the need for organisations to address the complex communal objectives and motivations of members of crowd-sourced communities.

Practical implications – Organisations need to acknowledge and address the complex and dynamic communal and commercial tensions that inherently emerge in online crowd-sourced communities. They need to adopt a tribal marketing approach and respectfully engage with community members if the diverse objectives of community members and the host organisations are to be satisfactorily met.

Originality/Value – Organisations and researchers need to recognise and acknowledge that crowdsourcing both begets communal conflict and fosters collaborative behaviour due to contested commercial and social orientations. While mindful of their commercial objectives, organisations will succeed in implementing online crowd-sourcing initiatives if they make a sincere effort to understand and respect the diversity, culture and social norms of the particular crowd-sourced online community concerned.

Many companies worldwide are currently involved in open innovation processes (OIPs), through which they aim to collect innovative insights and ideas from the crowd. The phenomenon has grown – and is destined to continue to grow – massively. As a result, there is strong interest from scholars and practitioners in rebuilding the relevant processes and developing a set of best practices. What seems to be missing from this developing topic of research is a focus on its antecedents and consequences. Since the phenomenon is so new, a focus on its consequences seems untimely. A focus on its antecedents, on the other hand, seems both promising and intriguing.

The fact that more and more companies are involved in OIPs suggests that they have already developed an organizational open innovation (OI) culture. If an OI culture already exists, how widespread is it and to what extent is it shared among those involved in knowledge ecosystems? With this question in mind, it seems worthwhile to investigate whether OI is supported culturally at both social and individual levels.

Finally, this chapter summarizes the state of the art of OI culture at social, organizational and individual levels and considers how an OI culture developed at company level may serve to drive its development at the social and individual levels.

Social media platforms, along with networked devices and applications, enable their user base to produce, access and circulate large volumes of data. On the one hand, this development contains an empowering potential for users, who can make otherwise obscured aspects of social life visible, and coordinate social action in accordance. Yet the preceding activities in turn render these users visible to governments as well as the multinational companies that operate these services. Between these two visions lie more nuanced accounts of individuals coordinating via social data for reactionary purposes, as well as policing and intelligence agencies struggling with the affordances of big data.

This chapter considers how individual users as well as police agencies respectively actualise the supposedly revolutionary and repressive potentials associated with big data. It briefly considers the broader social context in which ‘big data’ is situated, which includes the hardware, software, individuals and cultural values that render big data meaningful and useful. Then, in contrast to polarising visions of the social impact of big data, it considers two sets of practices that speak to a more ambivalent potentiality. First, recent examples suggest a kind of crowd-sourced vigilantism, where individuals rely on ubiquitous data and devices in order to reproduce law and order politics. Second, police agencies in various branches of European governments report a sense of obligation to turn to social data as a source of intelligence and evidence, yet attempts to do so are complicated by both practical and procedural challenges. A combination of case studies and in-depth interviews offers a grounded understanding of big data in practice, in contrast to commonly held visions of these technologies.

First, big data is only ever meaningful in use. While they may be contained in databases in remote locations, big data do not exist in a social vacuum. Their impact cannot be fully understood in the context of newly assembled configurations or ‘game-changing’ discourses. Instead, they are only knowable in the context of existing practices. These practices can initially be the sole remit of public discourse shaped by journalists, tech-evangelists and even academics. Yet embodied individual and institutional practices also emerge, and this may contradict or at least complicate discursive assertions. Secondly, the range of devices and practices that make up big data are engaged in a bilateral relation with these practices. They may be a platform to further reproduce relations of information exchange and power relations. Yet they may also reconfigure these relations.

This research is limited to a sample of respondents based in the European Union, and based at a particular stage of big data and social media monitoring uptake. Subsequent research should look at how this uptake is occurring elsewhere, along with the medium to long-term implications of big data monitoring. Finally, subsequent research should consider how citizens and other social actors are coping with these emerging practices.

This chapter considers practices associated with big data monitoring and draws from cross-national empirical data. It stands in contrast to overly optimistic as well as well as totalising accounts of the social costs and consequences of big data. For these reasons, this chapter will be of value to scholars in internet studies, as well as privacy advocates and policymakers who are responsive to big data developments.