When to Signal? Contingencies for Career-Motivated Contributions in Online Collaboration Communities

Online collaboration communities are increasingly taking on new roles beyond knowledge creation and exchange, especially the role of a skill-signaling channel for career-motivated community members. This paper examines the contingency effects of job-market conditions for career-motivated knowledge contributions in online collaboration communities. From the data of individual-level activities in a computer programming-related online Q&A community (Stack Overflow), merged with job-market data for software developers, we find robust evidence of a positive association between community members’ career motivations and their knowledge contributions. More importantly, we find that this positive relationship is strengthened by job-market conditions: the number of vacancies in the job market, the expected salaries from these jobs, and the transparency in the flow of career-related information between the community and external recruiters. We contribute to the motivation literature in online collaboration communities by identifying and substantiating the role of contextual factors in mobilizing members’ career motivation. Our study thus offers novel insight into how career motivation can be effectively utilized to motivate contributors in these communities. Our findings also point to a possible paradigm change by characterizing online collaboration communities as emerging institutions for career motivation and skill signaling

When to Signal? The Contextual Conditions for Career-Motivated User Contributions in Online Collaboration Communities

This paper examines the contextual conditions for users’ career concern as a motivational driver of contributions in online collaboration communities. On the data of user-level activities from a computer programming-related online Q&A community (Stack Overflow), merged with job-market data for software-developer, we find robust evidence of a positive association between individual users’ career concern and their contributions. More important, we find that this positive relationship is further strengthened through the contextual conditions: the number of vacancies in the job market, the expected salaries from these jobs, and the transparency in the flow of career-related information within the community. We contribute to the literature on motivation in online collaboration communities. Our study thus offers insight into how career concern can be effectively utilized to motivate contributors in these communities. Our findings also foreshadow a possible paradigm change by characterizing online collaboration communities as institutions of career concern and skill signaling

The impacts of science and technology policy interventions on university research: Evidence from the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative

We examine how the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), a recent U.S. government science and technology (S&T) program launched in 2000, affects the nature of university research in nanotechnology. We characterize the NNI as a policy intervention that targets the commercialization of technology and a focused research direction to promote national economic growth. As such, we expect that the NNI has brought about unintended consequences in the direction of university-industry knowledge flows and the characteristics of university research output in nanotechnology. Using a difference-in-differences analysis of U.S. nanotechnology patents filed between 1996 and 2007, we find that, after the NNI, U.S. universities have significantly increased knowledge inflows from the industry, reduced the branching-out to novel technologies, narrowed down the research scope, and become less likely to generate technological breakthroughs, as compared to other U.S. and non-U.S. research institutions. Our findings suggest that, at least in the case of the NNI, targeted government S&T programs may increase the efficiency of university research, but potentially do so at a price. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.close0

Soft but Strong: Software-Based Innovation and Product Differentiation in the IT Hardware Industry

It has been argued in recent years that software is a significant value-creating factor within the manufacturing sector, leading to an increased interest in understanding the mechanisms by which firms may benefit from software-based innovation. Empirical work in evaluating these mechanisms, however, remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we examine one such process through which software-based innovation may provide value for information technology hardware firms in the U.S. Specifically, we examine the influence of software patents on the extent to which firms are able to benefit from product differentiation in their product markets. Using data on over 380,000 patent grants for innovations filed by 730 public IT hardware firms over the time period 1996-2015, we find that greater levels of software-based innovation within the firm are associated with higher levels of product differentiation in product markets: increases in the intensity of software patents within the firm’s patent stock, which we refer to as software intensity, are associated with lower total similarity of product offerings, relative to those offered by rivals, as well as fewer effective competitors in the market. Furthermore, using a different dataset consisting of 23,000 new IT hardware product announcements, we show that firms with greater software intensity subsequently launch a higher number of new products. Moreover, these firms are more likely to launch products that are not only differentiated from those of rivals but also distinct from their own product lines. Our research contributes to the emerging literature on software-based innovation by substantiating an important mechanism through which software helps transform industry sectors, specifically through product differentiation