Search

This paper focuses on the interplay between firms and open and collaborative innovation communities. We develop a formal model where both volunteers (agents setting their agendas freely) and firm's employees (agents whose agenda is mostly set by their employer) participate in the creation of a common artifact. In this framework, we discuss how firms can influence the architecture of the emerging product to assure fast and performant development and a desirable distribution of innovative labor within the project team. We find that closing the project only to employees implies high speed and performance if employees are given autonomy in certain dimensions and are directed in others. In this case, however, we observe a trade-off in terms of ideal core–periphery division of labor on one side and development speed and performance on the other side. At the opposite extreme, creating a volunteer-only project can ease the trade-off but assures positive results only if the firm is able to set up an entry mechanism that "surgically" selects volunteers with specific preferences. A mixture of both employees and volunteers can strike a good balance, relaxing the two constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online communities have emerged as important organizational forms, but there are many gaps in our understanding. In particular, researchers have mainly focused on individual-level drivers of behaviors in communities, while downplaying (formal, informal) context at various levels. We theorize that different dimensions of context (i.e. omnibus and discrete context) influence decision-making in online communities through mechanisms involving community members' attention. Specifically, context influences which problems members perceive and which solutions they retrieve and apply, thereby shaping the process of matching solutions and problems. We derive four hypotheses about contribution behaviors in online communities and how such behaviors are influenced by context. The empirical setting for our study is the open-source software community. We find support for our hypotheses in a unique dataset that captures the behavior of 24,057 community members who used the SourceForge.net online platform from 2000 to 2002. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the conditions under which open collaborative innovation communities can be generated and are able to grow and prosper in the long run. We build a formal model of the interaction between such communities and the alternative institutional setting based on intellectual property rights that we call Technology. The model accounts for both the communitarian social process taking place inside the community and for the presence of spillovers both across and within each institution. We prove that communities grow endogenously above a certain size threshold, and that such growth depends on supply-side mechanisms centered on the developers’ social motivations and interactions. In a comparative statics analysis, we show that the community’s innovative performance rests not only on its own characteristics (strength of social motivations and/or of protection of the community-produced knowledge) but also on factors outside its scope, namely, the institutional characteristics of Technology. We discuss the managerial and policy implications of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A systems analysis perspective is adopted to examine the critical properties of the Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) mode of innovation, as reflected on the SourceForge platform (SF.net). This approach re-scales March's (1991) framework and applies it to characterize the "innovation system" of a "distributed organization" of interacting agents in a virtual collaboration environment, rather than to innovation within a firm. March (1991) views the process of innovation at the organizational level as the coupling of sub-processes of exploration and exploitation. Correspondingly, the innovation system of the virtual collaboration environment represented by SF.net is an emergent property of two "coupled" processes: one involves the interactions among agents searching the locale for information and knowledge resources to use in designing novel software products (i.e., exploration), and the other involves the mobilization of individuals' capabilities for application in the software development projects that become established on the platform (i.e., exploitation). The micro-dynamics of this system are studied empirically by constructing transition probability matrices representing the movements of 222,835 SF.net users among seven different activity states, which range from "lurking" (not contributing or contributing to projects without becoming a member) to "laboring" (joining one or more projects as members), and to "launching" (founding one or more projects) within each successive 6-month interval. The estimated probabilities are found to form first- order Markov chains describing ergodic processes. This makes it possible the computation of the equilibrium distribution of agents among the states, thereby suppressing transient effects and revealing persisting patterns of project joining and project launching. The latter show the FLOSS innovation process on SF.net to be highly dissipative: a very large proportion of the registered "developers" fail to become even minimally active on the platform. There is nevertheless an active core of mobile project joiners, and a (still smaller) core of project founders who persist in creating new projects. The structure of these groups' interactions (as displayed within the 3-year period examined) is investigated in detail, and it is shown that it would be sufficient to sustain both the exploration and exploitation phases of the platform's global dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]