Person:

Nagle, Francis

This is the first study to consider the relationship between open source software (OSS) and entrepreneurship around the globe. This study measures whether country-level participation on the GitHub OSS platform affects the founding of innovative ventures, and where it does so, for what types of ventures. We estimate these effects using cross-country variation in new venture founding and OSS participation. We propose an approach using instrumental variables, and cannot reject a causal interpretation. The study finds that an increase in GitHub participation in a given country generates an increase in the number of new technology ventures within that country in the subsequent year. The evidence suggests this relationship is complementary to a country’s endowments, and does not substitute for them. In addition to this positive change in the rate of entrepreneurship, we also find a change in direction—OSS contributions lead to new ventures that are more mission- and global-oriented and are of a higher quality. Together, the results suggest that OSS can boost entrepreneurial activity, albeit with a human capital prerequisite. Finally, we consider the implications for policies that encourage OSS as a lever for stimulating entrepreneurial growth.

Management research has increasingly explored the domains of ecosystems, platforms, and open/user/distributed innovation—governance structures focused on engaging with external communities. While these research areas include substantial empirical and theoretical work and share notable similarities, the literature streams have evolved separately limiting our ability to understand underlying mechanisms and dynamics. We comprehensively review these distinct literatures to highlight commonalities and induce novel insights. We introduce the overarching concept of the managed ecosystem governance structure through which an organization engages external communities for value creation and capture such that the locus of activity resides outside organizational boundaries while the locus of control remains within the organization. It represents a translucent hand between the invisible hand of the market and visible hand of the organizational hierarchy. Because the extant literature only lightly addresses incumbent organizations transitioning to these models and rarely touches upon those operating with multiple governance structures simultaneously, we further review and synthesize research on organizational adaptation and ambidexterity. From this integrative review, we identify capabilities to execute managed ecosystems including shepherding communities without exploiting them, managing data and intellectual property, ecosystem-driven open adaptation, and ambidextrous governance. We additionally present opportunities for future research across these research domains.

In this essay, we explore how strategic management research and practice could benefit from considering the benefits and challenges obtainable through working with user communities. User communities represent a unique organizing structure for the exchange of ideas and knowledge: they are composed primarily of users working collaboratively, voluntarily, and with minimal oversight to freely and openly develop and exchange knowledge around a common artifact. The prevalence of user communities appears to be on the rise, as evidenced by communities across a variety of fields including software, Legos, sports equipment, and automobiles. The innovation literature has begun to document the power of user communities as a source of open innovation, yet the broader strategic implications of user communities remain underexplored: existing research coupled with examples suggests that user communities can be used to enact both differentiation and low-cost strategies. We discuss the benefits that user communities can provide and the challenges they can create for firms, develop a framework for understanding the differences between how user communities and firms are organized and operate, and theorize the conditions under which user communities will emerge and function, thereby illustrating the relevance and import of user communities to firms and the strategic management literature.

We consider the role of individual‐level diversification as a mechanism through which skilled researchers engage in successful exploration—recognizing and integrating new knowledge external to one's domains of expertise. To approach an ideal experiment, we (a) employ a matching procedure and (b) exploit the unexpected adoption of Microsoft Kinect as a motion‐sensing technology in research. We evaluate the impact of Kinect and its embodiment of new knowledge on a set of ability‐matched, diversity‐varying researchers without prior experience in motion‐sensing and find that diversified researchers explore more successfully than their more specialized peers. We also examine the role of personal preferences and professional incentives as antecedents of diversification and find that culture, age and intellectual freedom are positively associated with the propensity to diversify successfully.