Dimitri - Article Review Five

User innovation and entrepreneurship in the virtual world: A study of Second Life residents

Yanto Chandra, Mark Leenders

While this paper is an empirical study into multiple experiences of Second Life residents using Second Life as a platform for user innovation, I chose this article based on it following the experiences of a visual artist. Because of this, my review does not look at the method of data collection or the aims of the study, but rather the individual comments surrounding a single participant.

This participant is Josina Burgess, an artist from the Netherlands. She started playing Second Life after seeing an advertisement for it on television and was interested in how it would explore art. She has a background in painting, singing and fashion design, so simply picked up the exploration of Second Life as a hobby. However, as she continued to explore and meet people within Second Life, she discovered that it could become an extension of her real life activities.

From this she started two things.

The first was the creation of a Second Life business to sell her real life paintings to Second Life residents. Whether this is a business that she only facilitates in the form of Second Life items, or if she also sells the actual physical paintings to customers she meets in Second Life is not clarified.

The second thing she created was The Wall of Diabolus. The Wall is a digital multimedia experience of a musical theatre designed to help keep the music industry alive as file sharing diminishes it. It, in collaboration with another project she has started, the Cybernetic Arts Research Project (CARP), works to bring together artists to collaborate in creation and in display of arts. CARP is specifically focused on film animation.

When she first started using Second Life, Burgess had no intention of using it as a platform for a start-up, but the prior knowledge from her offline experiences helped to influence her abilities to discover a virtual context to extend her skills into in a user innovation created commercial success.

Now, she works with many Second Life art projects, with all her collaborators met in Second Life with little to no influence from offline networking. She also uses the virtual world platform as a way to collect feedback from other users of Second Life, such as through a virtual book that is published for The Wall, and through teaching programs done through an education subgroup of CARP (known as CERP).

This anecdote of an entrepreneur in a virtual world offers a different insight into art in the virtual world than most studies which tend to focus on education. The highlighting of the fact that Burgess didn't start with the intention of moving to business within Second Life, as well as the fact that all her connections for the projects were made within the virtual world rather than outside of it, can show just how much a virtual world platform can offer. It also extends on evidence from previous readings that something like Second Life is not simply for socialising. It is a platform that can be treated the same way we treat the offline world, with opportunities for exploring all paths of life outside of a social media restriction.

Chandra, Y. & Leenders, M. (2012). User innovation and entrepreneurship in the virtual world: A study of Second Life residents. Technovation, 32(7-8), 464-476