Do-It-Yourself or Do-It-Together: How digital technologies affect creating alone or with others?

• Published in: Technovation 2022-04, Vol.112, p.102412, Article 102412
• Main Authors: Fauchart, Emmanuelle, Bacache-Beauvallet, Maya, Bourreau, Marc, Moreau, François
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Collaboration; Creativity; Digital technology; DIT; DIY; Humanities and Social Sciences; Music industry; Quantitative Finance
• ISSN: 0166-4972; 1879-2383
• DOI: 10.1016/j.technovation.2021.102412

The literature is rather inconclusive when it comes to asserting whether digital technologies tend to favor collaboration (Do-It-Together, DIT) or creating alone (Do-It-Yourself, DIY) in creative production. In this paper, we argue that providing an answer to that question implies adopting a micro-perspective, which ties individual creators’ usage of different types of digital technologies, and their choices of DIT or DIY. Using data from a sample of French musicians, we find that while the use of some digital technologies is clearly associated with artists creating alone, other digital technologies have a more ambiguous association with DIY or DIT. We then uncover the boundary conditions of the association of these ambiguous technologies with DIY and DIT behaviors by showing how individual characteristics of the creators moderate this association. •Digital technologies enable both collaboration (Do-It-Together), and individualism (Do-It-Yourself) in creative production.•Distinguishing the substitution and information effects associated with different digital technologies matters.•Substitution effect is associated with DIY, information effect favors both DIY and DIT.•Individual features (age, reputation and breadth of talent) affect the use of digital information tools for either DIY or DIT.