IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/ororsc/v33y2022i1p212-230.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Open Source Collaboration in Digital Entrepreneurship

Author

Listed:
  • Yu-Kai Lin

    (Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia 30303)

  • Likoebe M. Maruping

    (Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia 30303)

Abstract

Emerging digital technologies give rise to digital entrepreneurship and the widespread phenomenon of open source collaboration (OSC) on GitHub for entrepreneurial pursuits. Although openness is a common theme in digital entrepreneurship, it is unclear how digital startups—that is, startups that that have digital artifacts at the core of their business model for value creation and capture—actually realize value from their OSC engagement. We develop a theoretical framework to explain how the engagement in OSC may affect the value of digital startups and how the effect is contingent on the stage of venture maturity (conception, commercialization, or growth) and the mode of OSC engagement (inbound or outbound). In analyses that pool 17,552 matched digital startups with monthly panel observations between 2008 and 2017, we find digital startups in the conception and commercialization stages benefit more from inbound OSC whereas the ones in the growth stage benefit more from outbound OSC. As digital startups increasingly use OSC for ideation, experimentation, and scaling, our contribution is to show whether, when, and how knowledge flows through OSC might affect the value of digital startups. We discuss implications for research on organizing for digital entrepreneurship as well as open innovation.

Suggested Citation

  • Yu-Kai Lin & Likoebe M. Maruping, 2022. "Open Source Collaboration in Digital Entrepreneurship," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 33(1), pages 212-230, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:33:y:2022:i:1:p:212-230
    DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2021.1538
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1538
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/orsc.2021.1538?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Léo-Paul Dana & Edoardo Crocco & Francesca Culasso & Elisa Giacosa, 2024. "Mapping the field of digital entrepreneurship: a topic modeling approach," International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, Springer, vol. 20(2), pages 1011-1045, June.
    2. Nicolas Jullien & Robert Viseur & Jean-Benoît Zimmermann, 2025. "A theory of FLOSS projects and Open Source business models dynamics," Post-Print hal-04963100, HAL.
    3. Anca Elena Lungu & Mircea Radu Georgescu & Daniel Juravle, 2024. "A Bibliometric Analysis of Digital Entrepreneurship," Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Springer;Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), vol. 15(4), pages 18617-18645, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:33:y:2022:i:1:p:212-230. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.