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Paper short abstract

I will examine Amazon's SocialBot Grand challenge for the voice assistant Alexa, in which teh company invites university researchers to innovate alongside Amazon. Due to constrictive management and alignment towards Amazon's goals, I show how the resulting research is not transformative.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates Amazon's SocialBot Grand challenge in the long standing research Alexa Prize Competition and asks whether the competitions' have failed as a framework for innovation.

Drawing on qualitative interviews with participants, the study examines how Amazon’s Platform Governance structures shape the conditions of Third-Party Developer Innovation and influence the everyday work of developing for the Alexa ecosystem. The analysis shows that Amazon’s emphasis on user satisfaction directs developer effort away from exploratory innovation and toward continuous maintenance and repair. These dynamics are reinforced by Amazon’s organizational processes, which establish evaluation, support, and oversight in ways that further limit Third-Party Developer Innovation. The findings reveal how the company’s Software Development Infrastructure simultaneously enables and constrains novelty, producing a culture of ‘good enoughness’ that stands in tension with the competition’s rhetoric of Silicon Valley exceptionalism.

The paper explores the question whether the research framework that has been tailored to produce research that is aligned with Amazon's goals is productive for creating transformative research. By investigating innovation at the cutting-edge of technology development in the tech industry, comparisons to public research can be drawn. Despite creating an effective niche for innovation, the frictions between research in industry and university lead to misalignment in motivations, which indicate that a need for flexibility in reserach frameworks is needed to counteract this.