OUTLAW COMMUNITY INNOVATIONS

Abstract

Recent studies of outlaw communities provide qualitative evidence of their existence and the organisation of the underlying innovation processes. We provide descriptive results from a large scale survey of two online outlaw communities focussing on Microsoft's XBox (a gaming console). Based on the previous findings, we identify two types of participants in outlaw communities — user innovators and adopters. Based on 2256 responses, we find that users modify their XBox mainly to be able to increase the set of available functions of their XBox. Users are also motivated to modify their XBox for the sake of having fun and to conduct pirate behaviour. Finally, results from our survey also suggest that user innovators are largely intrinsically motivated by fun and the intellectual stimulation of writing code for homebrew software.Outlaw community innovation, video game consoles, homebrew software