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

By Eric von Hippel, Georgvon Krogh. Organ. Sci., 2003

2,182 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Currently, two models of innovation are prevalent in organization science. The "private investment" model assumes returns to the innovator result 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 "private-collective" model of innovation that contains elements of both the private investment and the collective action models and can offer society the "best of both worlds" under many conditions. 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 offer some advice on conducting empirical studies on open source software development processes.

Subfields: Accounting, Computer Science Applications, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4fce24239a429317a709e9dcad6da9dcdcf45e8b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

In Computer Science Applications

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Where do transactions come from? Modularity, transactions, and the boundaries of firms (2007, positive): “Thus, thick crossing points are necessarily places with high Williamsonian (1985) transaction costs.”