Filthy Lucre? Innovative Communities, Identity, and Commercialization

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

Sustainability Standards and Stakeholder Engagement: Lessons From Carbon Markets

Stakeholders play an increasingly active role in private governance, including development of standards for measuring sustainability. Building on prior studies focused on standards and stakeholder engagement, we use an innovation management theoretical lens to compare stakeholder engagement and standards developed in two carbon markets: the Climate Action Reserve and the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism. We develop and test hypotheses regarding how different processes of stakeholder engagement in standard development affect the number, identity, and age of stakeholders involved, as well as the variation and quality of the resulting standards. In doing so, we contribute to the growing literature on stakeholder engagement in developing sustainability standards

The future of digital entrepreneurship research: existing and emerging opportunities: professional development workshop

Digital entrepreneurship — the intersection of digital technologies and entrepreneurship — is gaining increasing importance in the global economy and scholarly community. This PDW set out to establish a community platform for and shared understanding amongst information systems researchers who are interested in shaping the future of digital entrepreneurship research within and beyond the discipline’s boundaries. The simple framework presented in this short paper represents the first step of this endeavor and served as the foundation to structure thinking and discussions at the PDW. The framework identifies three fundamental dimensions of the digital entrepreneurship phenomenon — digital technologies as enablers, outcomes, or contexts of entrepreneurship processes — that form distinct sub-themes of digital entrepreneurship research and illustrates potential research topics that flow from each of them and their intersections

Emergent leadership in online communities: an interactive process of co-influencing

We propose a theoretical approach informed by a power-in-practice perspective that allows us to examine the emergence of leadership in online communities. We theorize leadership emergence as a process of co-influencing that is constituted by forces of ‘pushing’ and ‘pulling’ different enactments of power that are formative of communal interactions. More specifically we identify three pathways for emergent leadership based on different modes of community influence. These insights are based on a detailed exploration of interactions in one particular online community #WeAreNotWaiting, offering distinct contributions to the literature on leadership emergence, particularly in online communities without formal roles and hierarchies

Essays on Business Value Creation in Digital Platform Ecosystems

Digital platforms and the surrounding ecosystems have garnered great interest from researchers and practitioners. Notwithstanding this attention, it remains unclear how and when digital platforms create business value for platform owners and complementors. This three-essay dissertation focuses on understanding business value creation in digital platform ecosystems. The first essay reviews and synthesizes literature across disciplines and offers an integrative framework of digital platform business value. Advised by the findings from the review, the second and third essays focus on the value creation for platform complementors. The second essay examines how IT startups entering a platform ecosystem at different times can strategically design their products (i.e., product diversification across platform architectural layers and product differentiation) to gain competitive advantages. Longitudinal evidence from the Hadoop ecosystem demonstrates that product diversification has an inverted U-shaped relationship with complementors success, and such an effect is more salient for earlier entrants than later entrants. Earlier entrants should develop products that are similar to other ecosystem competitors to reduce uncertainty whereas later entrants are advised to explore market niche and differentiate their products.The third essay investigates how platform complementors strategies and products co-evolve over time in the co-created ecosystem network environment. Our longitudinal analysis of the Hadoop ecosystem indicates that complementors technological architecture coverage and alliance exploration strategies increase their product evolution rate. In turn, complementors with faster product evolution are more likely to explore new partners but less likely to cover a wider range of the focal platforms technological layers in subsequent periods. Network density, co-created by all platform complementors, weakens the effects of complementors strategies on their product evolution but amplifies the effects of past product evolutions on strategies.This three-essay dissertation uncovers various understudied competitive strategies in the digital platform context and enriches our understanding of business value creation in digital platform ecosystems

Organizing an Online Community for Open Strategizing in a Large Organization

The creation of an online strategy community is increasingly attractive for companies as a mean to make the strategy process more inclusive and open. However, the fundamental difference between the flexible approach of open strategizing afforded by an online community and more controlled approaches of the traditional strategy formulation and implementation posits fundamental challenges for co-existence of these two processes. I argue that for these two processes to effectively co-exist, complex bridging process needs to take place in organizations. Furthermore, effective co-existence implies that open strategizing within an online community influences the formal strategy-making process. This thesis explores an online community as a distinct form of open strategizing in a large organization, to address two interdependent research questions related to organizing an online community for strategic influence: (1) ‘How do managers bridge open strategizing within an online community and formal strategy-making, characterized by closed and hierarchical decision-making?’ and (2) ‘How do managers organize an online strategy community to influence strategic decision-making in large organizations?’. This in-depth inductive single case study investigates strategy professionals at a large telecommunications firm Telco that instigated a unique online strategy platform to increase the openness of participation and to influence the formal strategy process. This empirical study utilizes multiple sources of data including interviews, online community logs, observations, and document analysis, the findings of which are summarized in two theoretical models. I identify three mechanisms that enable bridging between different strategizing processes, namely: 1) bidirectional framing with strategic concepts; 2) bidirectional structuring of communication; 3) building legitimacy of openness. The simultaneous enactment of three bridging mechanisms provides the greater influence of the formal decision-making process. Furthermore, I identify three main decision areas that managers have to consider carefully when organizing and online strategy community: 1) design of an online community structure; 2) cooperation of internal and external actors; 3) formulation of adequate strategic content. These decision areas are characterized by interdependencies and trigger contradictory demands that make open strategy processes a paramount organizational challenge