Open Source Software and the “Private-Collective” Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science
Name
orsc.14.2.209.14992.pdf
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235.05 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
08ae5e2e87228341d59e2e021800eed8
Author(s)
von Hippel, Eric A
Krogh, Georg von
Date Issued
April 2003
Journal
Organization Science
Publisher
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Citation
von Hippel, Eric and Georg von Krogh. "Open Source Software and the “Private-Collective” Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science." Organization Science 14, 2 (April 2003): 107-225 © 2003 INFORMS
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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.
Description
A version of this paper with a different license is available in the MIT Open Access Articles collection at https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/106296.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.14.2.209.14992
