Promotionsvorhaben

Firms in Open Source  Software Development Managing Innovation Beyond Firm Boundaries

Name
Mario Schaarschmidt
Status
Abgeschlossen
Abschluss der Promotion
Erstbetreuer*in
Prof. Dr. Harald von Korflesch
Gutachter*in 2
Prof. Dr. Gianfranco Walsh
Firms are able to profit from technological developments without having ownership. However, as with the case of public goods, in the absence of ownership over the invention, the innovating firm has only limited options of protecting what it does not own against unintended use by legal means. Thus, in the absence of legal protection mechanisms, such as in the case of Open Source Software (OSS), firms that engage in development seek to obtain control over the project’s trajectory in order to align the technical artifact with their own interests. In this dissertation, I suggest that firms have basically two options to control project work beyond their boundaries and beyond their vertical command chains. First, in accordance with Ouchi’s (1979) clan control, the firm might purse what I term “resource-deployment-based control” (RDBC). Developers working in OSS projects who earn salaries from the firm are also simultaneously embedded in organizational settings of the firm they work for. By inserting their norms and beliefs, which partly reflect the employing firm's interest, into the OSS project, these employees allow firms to (indirectly) influence the project's trajectory depending on the number of programmers assigned and their role in the project. Second, firms can control by obtaining leadership positions (control by leadership; CBL). In particular, individuals sponsored by firms gain leadership either by being elected by peers or by progressing to positions of lateral authority. Whereas informal or lateral authority is a function of an individual's network position, formal authority or leadership, respectively, is a consequence of technical contributions in advance. In their aim to control the project's trajectory, firms in general, and those with a business model dedicated to OSS in particular, seek to obtain central positions within the network of developers. Yet, there is a dearth of research examining developer networks with regard to individual's network position, communication intensity, technical contribution, and sponsorship simultaneously. To narrow this research gap, this dissertation is devoted to the role of firm-sponsored individuals within community-initiated multi-vendor projects as a means to manage innovation beyond firm boundaries. I use data from the Eclipse foundation as well as from Linux kernel mailing lists to provide evidence for the different control options by calculating centrality measures and using e-mail postfixes to distinguish voluntary from paid developers. As such, the dissertation aims to further the understanding of how knowledge work is coordinated and controlled in open innovation communities as well as how innovation can be managed beyond the boundaries of the firm.