Sonali K. Shah

Motivation, Governance, and the Viability of Hybrid Forms in Open Source Software Development

Open source software projects rely on the voluntary efforts of thousands of software developers, yet we know little about why developers choose to participate in this collective development process. This paper inductively derives a framework for understanding participation from the perspective of the individual software developer based on data from two software communities with different governance structures. In both communities, a need for software-related improvements drives initial participation. The majority of participants leave the community once their needs are met, however, a small subset remains involved. For this set of developers, motives evolve over time and participation becomes a hobby. These hobbyists are critical to the long-term viability of the software code: They take on tasks that might otherwise go undone and work to maintain the simplicity and modularity of the code. Governance structures affect this evolution of motives. Implications for firms interested in implementing hybrid strategies designed to combine the advantages of open source software development with proprietary ownership and control are discussed.

Building Better Theory by Bridging the Quantitative-Qualitative Divide

Qualitative methods for data collection and analysis are not mystical, but they are powerful, particularly when used to build new or refine existing theories. This article provides an introduction to qualitative methods and an overview of tactics for ensuring rigor in qualitative research useful for the novice researcher, as well as more experienced researchers interested in expanding their methodological repertoire or seeking guidance on how to evaluate qualitative research. We focus our discussion on the qualitative analytical technique of grounded theory building, and suggest that organizational research has much to gain by coupling of use of qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Pre-Entry Knowledge, Learning, and the Survival of New Firms

New firms are endowed with knowledge and experience at birth through the human capital of their founder(s). Existing empirical research suggests that this pre-entry knowledge and experience will influence the firms chances of survival; however, the mechanisms underlying this relationship have yet to be investigated. We seek to better understand and unpack this relationship. Specifically, we study the extent to which a founders pre-entry knowledge of the business activity and pre-entry management experience influence the effectiveness of two subsequent learning activities---namely, early-stage business planning and product-line change. Our findings suggest that pre-entry knowledge and management experience increase firm survival through moderating the effects of these subsequent learning activities. We also find that learning activities are not always beneficial; in our sample, early-stage business planning is associated with decreased firm survival, and product line change is associated with increased firm survival. We examine these patterns using survey data collected from 436 individuals in the Munich region who founded their own firms as an alternative to continued unemployment. Our results have theoretical implications for the entrepreneurship, evolutionary economics, and organizational learning literatures.

INDIVIDUAL AND OPPORTUNITY FACTORS INFLUENCING JOB CREATION IN NEW FIRMS

We build on multiple theoretical perspectives to investigate the unique and joint effects of individual- and opportunity-level factors affecting job creation in new firms. We tested hypotheses using survey data from individuals who transitioned from unemployment to self-employment under the auspices of a German public policy program. Our findings reveal that an entrepreneurs breadth of knowledge has a negative influence on the firms job creation, whereas the entrepreneurs leadership experience has a positive influence. However, as the sector-specific labor requirements of a business opportunity increase, both breadth of knowledge and leadership experience allow founders to operate their firms with fewer employees.

Who are User Entrepreneurs? Findings on Innovation, Founder Characteristics, and Firm Characteristics (The Kauffman Firm Survey)

Little is known about the paths individuals traverse prior to founding firms and the ramifications of these different paths on entrepreneurial outcomes. We investigate one particular path and its effects: user entrepreneurship. User entrepreneurship describes entrepreneurship by individuals who create innovative products or services because they need them for their own use and subsequently found firms to commercialize their innovations. A small number of industry-level studies suggest that many important innovative products and services are first introduced to the commercial marketplace by user entrepreneurs. Detailed data support this idea and describe user entrepreneurs and their firms. Specifically, we distinguish between three types of user-founded firms and contrast these firms with both the full sample of firms and firms engaged in R&D activities with respect to founder demographics, firm characteristics, and patterns of revenue growth, job creation, R&D investment, and intellectual property creation. In addition, we provide the first documentation of the prevalence of user entrepreneurship in the United States: 10.7 percent of all startups and 46.6 percent of innovative startups founded in the United States that survive to age five are founded by users.

From Innovation to Firm Formation: Contributions by Sports Enthusiasts to the Windsurfing, Snowboarding & Skateboarding Industries

Teams of employees at firms innovate. Scientists and engineers at universities and research institutions innovate. Inventors at private labs innovate. Regular people consume. Wrong! Regular people innovate, too. Users have been the source of many large and small innovations across a wide range of product classes, industries, and even scientific disciplines. In this paper I describe the contributions made by user innovators in the windsurfing, skateboarding, and snowboarding industries.

Unpacking Market Emergence and Firm Strategies in Nascent Industries

This symposium assembles four papers that examine market emergence and firm strategies in nascent industries. Specifically, we seek to understand heterogeneous actors, their independent and collabo...

A Time and a Place: Non-Profit Engagement in the Creation of Markets and Industry Emergence

This paper sheds light on how non-profit organizations can aid economic development by supporting the emergence of markets and industries in developing country contexts. We qualitatively examine archival data on the development of two industries: grain-storage metal silos in Central America during the late 1900s where nonprofits “seeded” new firms, and mobile money in Africa during the early 2000s where non-profits “transplanted” an established firm into Africa. Our comparison of these cases reveals two key findings. We find that either non-profits or firms can accomplish some activities, while other activities are undertaken only by non-profits. We also find that both nonprofits and firms circumvent institutional voids–that is they devise solutions that allow the focal industry to function while not necessarily providing a solution for the economy as a whole. We highlight opportunities for integrating institutional theory, organizational economics, and theories of industry and technology evolution to better understand how nonprofits and firms can work together to develop industries in underserved regions that have traditionally lacked strong institutions.

Structural sampling: A technique for illuminating social systems

In this chapter, we argue that combining different qualitative research methods can facilitate the study of collective cognition in organizations, thus compensating the limitations of more traditional approaches. Using our own research experience in studying how designers develop new ideas, we explain how the combined use of ethnography, grounded theory and visual narrative analysis allowed us to gain a deep understanding of how material practices influence collective cognitive sensemaking in organizations. In particular, we show (1) how ethnography allowed us to map and unpack the material practices designers engage in when developing new ideas, (2) how interviews and grounded theory helped us articulate informants’ interpretations of these practices and reveal the underlying cognitive processes, and, finally, (3) how visual narrative analysis was useful to systematically track changes in the evolving collective interpretations, and by doing so to link together practices and processes in a longitudinal fashion.In this chapter we discuss a sampling technique that has been employed in recent works, but has yet to be delineated as a distinct methodology: “structural sampling.” Structural sampling allows the investigator to illuminate the inner-workings of a social system by interviewing actors in a variety of roles and making comparisons across multiple levels of analysis. We describe the technique of structural sampling and its purpose, elucidate the benefits and challenges of structural sampling, provide several examples to illustrate potential uses of this technique, and situate structural sampling in the context of extant qualitative research methodologies.