Open Source Software and the “Private-Collective” Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science

Currently two models of innovation are prevalent in organization science. The "private investment" model assumes returns to the innovator results from private goods and efficient regimes of intellectual property protection. The "collective action" model assumes that under condi...

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書目詳細資料
Main Authors: von Hippel, Eric A., von Krogh, Georg
格式: Working Paper
語言:en_US
出版: Cambridge, MA; Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2011
主題:
在線閱讀:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/66145
實物特徵
總結:Currently two models of innovation are prevalent in organization science. The "private investment" model assumes returns to the innovator results from private goods and efficient regimes of intellectual property protection. The "collective action" model assumes that under conditions of market failure, innovators collaborate in order to produce a public good. The phenomenon of open source software development shows that users program to solve their own as well as shared technical problems, and freely reveal their innovations without appropriating private returns from selling the software. In this paper we propose that open source software development is an exemplar of a compound model of innovation that contains elements of both the private investment and the collective action models. We describe a new set of research questions this model raises for scholars in organization science. We offer some details regarding the types of data available for open source projects in order to ease access for researchers who are unfamiliar with these, and also