Designing shared spaces for firm‐community collaborations for innovation: Formal policies and coordination in open source projects

Abstract

This paper adds to the growing debate on the design of the shared space between firms and communities in co‐innovation processes. We investigate specific organizational design initiatives that firms can take when collaborating with online communities to nurture their joint knowledge creation process and to realize a useful output. We contend that drafting a formal policy, leaving the coordination of the joint project to others and, in case of taking on the coordination duty, dedicating an employee's full time to realize the project administrator task can help increase the amount of useful output of such collaborations. Results based on a sample of 1,099 open source software projects hosted on the platform http://SourceForge.net support our hypotheses.

The social side of innovation: peer influence in online brand communities

“…The findings help enrich the research on factors affecting idea quality in OBCs. While previous studies on idea quality in OBCs have focused mainly on individual ideators' characteristics, idea characteristics and community policy guarantees (Aksoy et al. , 2021; Bayus, 2013; Camacho et al.…”

“…Previous studies on the factors influencing the quality of ideas generated in OBCs have primarily focused on factors at the individual level, such as ideators' characteristics, ideas' characteristics, member feedback and community policies (Aksoy et al. , 2021; Bayus, 2013; Camacho et al.…”

“…Online brand communities (OBCs) have emerged as a significant source of consumer ideas in digital social networks (Aksoy et al. , 2021).…”

The collaborative and contested interplay between business and civil society in circular economy transitions

“…This will typically involve a champion within the firm who spearheads the change and redesign process, working closely with CSOs. Businesses can either create an internal position to oversee sustainability in the organization as a coordinator between internal and external stakeholders (Aksoy‐Yurdagul et al, 2021) or hire an external consultant from a professional company or indeed a CSO.…”

Extracting firms' R&D processes from patent data to study inbound and coupled open innovation

“…Indeed, there are not totally clear the mechanisms and the circumstances that allow OI to perform better than the traditional internal development. Among the few contributions focusing on OI at the project level, the features of involved players (Du et al, 2014; Füller et al, 2012; Gattringer et al, 2017), the risks related to OI projects (Frishammar et al, 2015; Marullo et al, 2020), the role of complexity (Gurca et al, 2020; Lee et al, 2019) and novelty (Hsieh & Tidd, 2012), the organizational tools (Aksoy‐Yurdagul et al, 2021; Lakemond et al, 2016; Pellizzoni et al, 2019) and the effects on innovation performances (Kobarg et al, 2019) are investigated. However, how OI interconnects with a firm's technological strategies, which output is able to achieve and what is the outcome for the company adopting such a paradigm is a less explored research area.…”