Filthy Lucre? Innovative Communities, Identity, and Commercialization

Abstract

Online communities play an increasingly important role in developing innovation. However, relatively little is known about the ways in which community affiliation influences how innovations and products generated in these communities are commercialized. By examining open source software (OSS) as an example of an innovation community and using both a quasi experiment and a longitudinal survey, I seek to shed light on this issue. In the quasi experiment, using the launch of the Apple App Store, I find a decreased propensity toward commercialization among individuals associated with online community innovation. I then examine the mechanisms for this decreased commercialization with a novel longitudinal survey of OSS community members. Despite the history of OSS as an anticommercial community, I do not find that anticommercial attitudes play a role in commercialization decisions. Instead, differences in entrepreneurial self-identity have large significant effects on the propensity to commercialize. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the literatures on both entrepreneurial identity and community innovation. Abstract:Online communities play an increasingly important role in developing new innovations. However, relatively little is known about the ways in which community affiliation may change the incentives to commercialize those new innovations. By examining Open Source Software (OSS) as an example of an innovation community, and using both a quasi-experiment and a longitudinal survey, I seek to shed light on this issue. In the quasi-experiment using the launch of the Apple App Store, I find a lower propensity towards commercialization among individuals associated with online community innovation. I then examine the mechanisms for this lower commercialization with a novel longitudinal survey of entrepreneurial activity among OSS community members. Despite the history of OSS as an anticommercial community, I do not find that anti-commercial attitudes play a role in commercialization decisions. Instead, differences in self-identity between community-based innovators and entrepreneurs have large significant effects on the propensity to commercialize innovations. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for both the literatures on entrepreneurial identity and community innovation.

Missing the Forest for the Trees: Prior Entrepreneurial Experience, Role Identity, and Entrepreneurial Creativity

“…Finally, extant research on entrepreneurial role identity has focused primarily on its main effect. By contrast, we introduced prior entrepreneurial experience as a contingency factor to expand the current focus on the main effect of identities on entrepreneurs' behavior (e.g., Gruber & Fauchart, 2011;Jain et al, 2009;Mathias & Williams, 2017;Mollick, 2016;Murnieks et al, 2012Murnieks et al, , 2020. We did not find a main effect (either chronic or situationally salient) of role identity in our study, perhaps because, at least for entrepreneurial idea generation, the influence of role identity differs drastically between experienced and novice entrepreneurs: Experienced entrepreneurs tend not to enact a role identity strongly just because it is situationally activated, but they also tend not to neglect a role identity that is not situationally salient.…”

“…Role identities are a key building block of entrepreneurs’ mental framework relating to how knowledge is organized, including the set of behaviors expected from a certain role (Corbett & Hmieleski, 2007). Entrepreneurs assume multiple roles, which can be classified into two broad categories: inventor and businessperson (Jain et al, 2009; Mollick, 2016). The inventor role emphasizes the novelty of a product or service (i.e., “Is it new?”), whereas the businessperson role stresses its commercial viability (i.e., “Will people buy it?”)—both of which are defining criteria of entrepreneurial creativity (Amabile, 1997; Baumol, 1993).…”

Platform diffusion at temporary gatherings: Social coordination and ecosystem emergence

“…We build on the foundations of prior research on the formation of platform–complementor relationships, which predominantly studies formal mechanisms (e.g., Hagiu, 2006), by identifying informal antecedents of complementor support, that is, social learning and social coordination. We thus contribute to an emerging stream of work that takes a socially embedded view of complementor behavior (Boudreau & Jeppesen, 2015; Eckhardt, 2016; Mollick, 2016; Nagaraj & Piezunka, 2018). We advance a novel methodology for studying platform–complementor relationships by demonstrating one way to use open‐source code to study developers longitudinally (Baldwin, Maccormack, & Rusnak, 2014; Polidoro & Yang, 2019).…”

“…GitHub serves as a valuable source of data to measure longitudinal developer activity (Gousios & Spinellis, 2014): over 26 million developers host their software projects on GitHub as of March 2017 16 . Many developers, including those in hackathons, use GitHub to collaborate, both within their teams and with the open‐source community (Mollick, 2016).…”

Sustainability Standards and Stakeholder Engagement: Lessons From Carbon Markets

“…We draw on concepts from innovation management research to describe the process of developing sustainability standards. Innovation management literature has identified different ways that organizations initiate the innovation process in contexts such as software development, medical research, and cell phone technology development (Franzoni & Sauermann, 2014;Mollick, 2016). The initiating organization, from whose perspective the innovation process is commonly viewed, can arrange the process in a number of ways, including crowdsourced or closed source configurations.…”