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Is Open Source about innovation? How interactions with the Open Source community impact on the innovative performances of entrepreneurial ventures

Author

Listed:
  • Evila Piva
  • Francesco Rentocchini
  • Cristina Rossi Lamastra

Abstract

Practitioners generally assert that collaboration with the Open Source software (OSS) community enables young software firms to achieve superior innovation performance. Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, scholars have never extensively speculated about this assertion or rigorously tested it. In this paper, we attempt to do so. First, we root on the entrepreneurship literature and on the OSS research stream to discuss and empirically investigate whether entrepreneurial ventures collaborating with the OSS community (OSS EVs) achieve innovation performance superior to that of their non-collaborating peers. Then, we refer to the concept of absorptive capacity to determine which factors make OSS EVs better able to leverage their collaboration with the OSS community for innovation purposes. Our econometric estimates use a sample of 230 firms and indicate that OSS EVs collaborating with the OSS community achieve superior innovation. At the same time, the impact of community collaborations on innovation is stronger for EVs that are endowed with more skilled human capital, have experience with firm- OSS community collaboration, and actively contribute to the community.

Suggested Citation

  • Evila Piva & Francesco Rentocchini & Cristina Rossi Lamastra, 2010. "Is Open Source about innovation? How interactions with the Open Source community impact on the innovative performances of entrepreneurial ventures," Department of Economics Working Papers 1020, Department of Economics, University of Trento, Italia.
    • Handle: RePEc:trn:utwpde:1020
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Eric von Hippel, 1994. ""Sticky Information" and the Locus of Problem Solving: Implications for Innovation," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 40(4), pages 429-439, April.
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    Cited by:

    1. Engelhardt, Sebastian v. & Freytag, Andreas, 2013. "Institutions, culture, and open source," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 95(C), pages 90-110.
    2. Massimo G. Colombo & Douglas Cumming & Ali Mohammadi & Cristina Rossi-Lamastra & Anu Wadhwa, 2016. "Open business models and venture capital finance," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 25(2), pages 353-370.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Entrepreneurial ventures; Open Source; firm-community collaboration; innovation performance;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L26 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Entrepreneurship
    • L17 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Open Source Products and Markets
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

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