Francesco Rullani

Online Communities and Open Innovation

The advent of Internet marked a significant change in how users and customers can be involved in the innovative process. History is rife with examples of how users innovate, but Internet and its associated communication technologies brought radically new means for individuals to interact rapidly and at little cost in communities that spur new innovations. These communities are initiated and governed by people that differ in their motivations for taking part and participate to varying degrees. Such communities are outside the immediate control of companies seeking to develop open innovation strategies aimed at harnessing their work. This book brings together distinguished scholars from different disciplines: economics, organization theory, innovation studies and marketing in order to provide an improved understanding of how technological as well as symbolic value is created and appropriated at the intersection between online communities and firms. Empirical examples are presented from different industries, including software, services and manufacturing. The book offers food for thought for academics and managers to an important phenomenon that challenges many conventional wisdoms for how business can be done. This book was published as a special issue of Industry and Innovation.

Explaining leadership in virtual teams: the case of open source software

This paper contributes to the open source software (OSS) literature by investigating the likelihood that a participant becomes a project leader. Project leaders are key actors in a virtual community and are crucial to the success of the OSS model. Knowledge of the forces that lead to the emergence of project managers among the multitude of participants is still limited. We aim to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing the association between the roles played by an individual who is registered with a project, and a set of individual-level and project-level characteristics. In line with the theory of occupational choice elaborated by (Lazear, E.P., 2002. Entrepreneurship. NBER Working Paper No. 9109, Cambridge, Mass; Lazear, E.P., 2004. Balanced skills and entrepreneurship, American Economic Review 94, pp. 208-211), we find that OSS project leaders possess diversified skill sets which are needed to select the inputs provided by various participants, motivate contributors, and coordinate their efforts. Specialists, like pure developers, are endowed with more focused skill sets. Moreover, we find that the degree of modularity of the development process is positively associated with the presence of project leaders. That result is consistent with the modern theory of modular production (Baldwin, C.Y., Clark, K.B., 1997. Managing in an age of modularity. Harvard Business Review September-October. pp. 84-93; Mateos-Garcia, J., Steinmueller, W.E., 2003. The Open Source Way of Working: A New Paradigm for the Division of Labour in Software Development? SPRU - Science and Technology Policy Studies. Open Source Movement Research INK Working Paper, No. 1; Aoki, M., 2004. An organizational architecture of T-form: Silicon Valley clustering and its institutional coherence. Industrial and Corporate Change 13, pp. 967-981).

Online Communities and Open Innovation: Governance and Symbolic Value Creation

The advent of Internet marked a significant change in how users and customers can be involved in the innovative process. History is rife with examples of how users innovate, but Internet and its associated communication technologies brought radically new means for individuals to interact rapidly and at little cost in communities that spur new innovations. These communities are initiated and governed by people that differ in their motivations for taking part and participate to varying degrees. Such communities are outside the immediate control of companies seeking to develop open innovation strategies aimed at harnessing their work. This book brings together distinguished scholars from different disciplines: economics, organization theory, innovation studies and marketing in order to provide an improved understanding of how technological as well as symbolic value is created and appropriated at the intersection between online communities and firms. Empirical examples are presented from different industries, including software, services and manufacturing. The book offers food for thought for academics and managers to an important phenomenon that challenges many conventional wisdoms for how business can be done. This book was published as a special issue of Industry and Innovation.

Health-Related Coping and Social Interaction in People with Multiple Sclerosis Supported by a Social Network: Pilot Study With a New Methodological Approach

Background Social media are a vital link for people with health concerns who find in Web communities a valid and comforting source for information exchange, debate, and knowledge enrichment. This aspect is important for people affected by chronic diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS), who are very well informed about the disease but are vulnerable to hopes of being cured or saved by therapies whose efficacy is not always scientifically proven. To improve health-related coping and social interaction for people with MS, we created an MS social network (SMsocialnetwork.com) with a medical team constantly online to intervene promptly when false or inappropriate medical information are shared. Objective The goal of this study was to assess the impact of SMsocialnetwork.com on the health-related coping and social interaction of people with MS by analyzing areas of interest through a Web-based survey. Methods Referring to previous marketing studies analyzing the online platform’s role in targeted health care, we conducted a 39-item Web-based survey. We then performed a construct validation procedure using a factorial analysis, gathering together like items of the survey related to different areas of interest such as utility, proximity, sharing, interaction, solving uncertainty, suggestion attitude, and exploration. Results We collected 130 Web-based surveys. The areas of interest analysis demonstrated that the users positively evaluated SMsocialnetwork.com to obtain information, approach and solve problems, and to make decisions (utility: median 4.2); improve feeling of closeness (proximity: median 5); catalyze relationships and text general personal opinions (sharing: median 5.6); get in touch with other users to receive innovative, effective, and practical solutions (interaction, solving uncertainty, and suggestion attitude medians were respectively: 4.1, 3, and 3); and share information about innovative therapeutic approaches and treatment options (suggestion attitude: median: 3.3). Conclusions SMsocialnetwork.com was perceived by users to be a useful tool to support health-related coping and social interaction, and may suggest a new kind of therapeutic alliance between physicians and people with MS.

Toward a New Industrial Organization? OSS in Economic and Managerial Perspective

At present, an more and more users are running Open Source software (OSS) on their systems. Major companies, like IBM, Oracle, or Sun Microsystems, have now started to make significant investments in developing open communities and creating a portfolio of systems incorporating OSS applications into their design. Meanwhile, an increasing number of firms are entering the market by offering OSS-based solutions to their customers, often supplying a mix of proprietary and open solutions through hybrid business models. In this context, economists and management scientists are now moving beyond the state of puzzlement that has driven much of the initial attention towards OSS. Located in the context of OSS2007 in order to foster close and fruitful interactions with scholars from various other disciplines, this workshop aims at contributing to the current evolutions of the economic and managerial research agendas about OSS, and thus to provide, first, an assessment of where we — economics and management scholars - are about OSS, and, second, an analysis of the renewed directions in which we should consider inquiring further in the near future, focusing notably on business, production, diffusion and innovation models.

Hybridisation of diverging institutional logics through common-note practices – an analogy with music and the case of social enterprises

Abstract Hybrid organisations exhibit high degree of innovativeness, but also instability due to the conflicting institutional logics underpinning their activities. We enrich the discussion on how to reconcile conflicting logics in hybrid organisations using the analogy with music theory. In particular, we get inspiration from a technique used to modulate conflicting harmonies by means of the notes they have in common (common-notes) to derive ideas on how to compose conflicting logics by means of the practices they have in common. We illustrate these ideas in the specific case of social enterprises, showing that practices able to ‘unblock’ a marginalised individual’s value creation capabilities can be considered common-note practices allowing the social enterprise to fruitfully and sustainably combine commercial and social welfare logics.

Crowdfunding as 'Donations': Theory & Evidence

For a wide class of crowdfunding approaches, we argue that the reward structure (for funders) is closer to that of charitable donations to public goods than it is to traditional entrepreneurial finance. Many features of the design of crowdfunding platforms can therefore be understood as attempts to deal with attendant “free-rider” problems in motivating contributions. Reviewing institutional features of today’s crowdfunding, we clarify that there are often limits in the extent to which tangible rewards can be used to motivate contributions. Drawing on analogies with charitable donations, we theorize that intangible sources of motivation — (i) direct psychological rewards, (ii) reciprocity and (iii) social interactions — can play a role in entrepreneurial crowdfunding. In our detailed empirical analysis of a representative project we find abundant evidence consistent with this characterization and we proceed to discuss implications for platform design and entrepreneurial funding and unique and defining characteristics of crowdfunding.

Inequality and marginalisation: social innovation, social entrepreneurship and business model innovation: The common thread of the DRUID Summer Conference 2015

Abstract Nowadays societies face many societal challenges, among which increasing inequality and marginalisation. This paper uses this key to read the discussion undertaken during the DRUID Conference 2015 ‘Relevance of Innovation’, held at LUISS Business School (Rome, IT). We focus on the speeches, sessions, and debates that were hosted at the conference. We expand them and build on them to advance scholarly discussion on how social innovation, social entrepreneurship and business model innovation can be used to face inequality and marginalisation. The main idea we place at the centre of the discussion is empowerment of marginalised individuals by social innovation initiatives and social entrepreneurial ventures. Business model innovation is seen as instrumental to this, being a crucial tool to foster hybrid organisations and institutions able to merge the social and economic dimensions.

A Test of Lazear’s Theory of Entrepreneurship in the Open Source Software Virtual Community

This paper studies the emergence of entrepreneurs and their skill profile in the open source software (OSS) community. We test the hypothesis that entrepreneurs, carrying out complex, multitask activities, have more balanced skill sets compared with individuals who are less involved in project management activities.Our empirical analysis employs the SourceForge dataset containing information on 77,039 individuals working in 54,229 OSS projects. We estimate logit and ordered logit models to explore the likelihood that an individual is a project founder or manager. Our main regressors include individual attributes like skill level and diversity, and project-level controls. Results support our hypothesis.

The micro-dynamics of open source software development activity

This study aims to isolate and identify the properties of FLOSS development insofar as these can be revealed by examining the ecology of SF.net. It characterizes the contrast between the many “lurkers” and a much smaller core of “entrepreneurial” developers who are responsible for launching new projects, and gives an interpretation of the function of platforms such as SF.net as sites that people with a propensity to start open source projects can use to recruit “laborers”. It describes the process underpinning the mobility of those who are recruited among the projects that are launched and provides insights on the evolution of developers’ level and mode of involvement in FLOSS production.