If you want to be cool, check out Cooliris. Their products are exciting, and their company is even more exciting. I learned about Cooliris last week at the Creating Infectious Engagement conference hosted by Stanford’s d.school.

Cooliris leaders described how they engage Stanford undergraduate interns in their development, testing, and marketing functions. The students led about half of the presentation, and they were amazing. They showed levels of engagement, creativity, and effort any firm would kill for—and they were doing this as volunteers.

I want to take a couple of blogs to describe how Cooliris builds and maintains this level of engagement. In today’s post I’ll focus on how they engage students’ Personal Motivation.

Source 1: Personal Motivation: Do people derive enjoyment, fulfillment, identity, or self respect from the Vital Behaviors?

Tough tasks—The interns described waking up in the middle of the night with ideas, then working from midnight until 3 am to get them on paper. They described getting an idea on Friday night, calling the other volunteers on their team, and having all of them drop their weekend plans to put the idea into practice. And a lot of the tasks sounded fairly tough—as in approaching hundreds of strangers, taking their pictures, making sure each person takes a business card, then loading all the photos onto a Web site that night. This level of commitment doesn’t stem from the tasks being fun.

Identity—Here is the magic. In crucial moments when an intern decides whether to work in the middle of the night, to give up her weekend, or to perform any number of unpleasant tasks, she doesn’t think of the tasks as “beneath her” or as “mind numbing.” Instead, she takes pride in them. These tasks define her as an entrepreneur, as charitable, and as smart and creative.

Entrepreneurial: Cooliris is the epitome of an entrepreneurial company. Being a part of its success makes these students entrepreneurs—and defines their actions as what it means to be an entrepreneur. This invests all of their actions with special meaning.

Charitable: it’s very clear that students are providing value for no monetary gain. For many, this is probably the most valuable donation they’ve ever been able to give to any cause. They believe in the Cooliris cause, so their generosity contributes to their self respect.

Smart & Creative: students are creating real value by translating their good ideas into concrete actions and results.

Flow—The students’ projects have all the ingredients to encourage what the psychologist, Mihalyi Chicksentmihi , calls “flow.” These include reasonably challenging goals, control over their part of the project, and clear, frequent feedback. These are the elements found in most popular games. The challenge, feedback, and improvement make the tasks engrossing, rewarding, and fun.

What does Cooliris do to engage these sources of personal motivation? They invite the students in. They may have some kind of selection process that puts value on the students. They give the students a lot of free reign, so that each can take responsibility for, and gain self respect from his or her accomplishments. At the same time they provide enough structure so that inexperienced students don’t fail too often or become lost in lengthy or unfinished projects that lack meaning.

Cooliris has done an amazing job of engaging students’ personal motivation, but they do far more than this.  Some of the most powerful reasons the students are so committed involve the social parts of the job. In my next post I’ll describe how Cooliris makes working there cool—how they create teams that rival a family’s pull and attraction.