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Linking Commons, Communities, and Innovation

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Entrepreneurship in Innovation Communities

Part of the book series: Contributions to Management Science ((MANAGEMENT SC.))

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Abstract

To approach the institutional tensions that affect innovation communities, this chapter starts out with a reception of the existing body of research in connection with common-pool resources. While initial interpretations of the commons emphasized their implicit vulnerabilities and thus revealed rather tragic notions, especially Ostrom’s insights on self-organized governance instead propose ways in which collective groups that jointly provide common-pool resources can guard themselves against free-riding and private appropriation.

To elaborate the linkages between commons, communities, and innovation further, this chapter proceeds with the state of research associated with topics of open and distributed innovation. My review of related work selectively focuses on available conceptions of the community form as well as the corresponding patterns of “doing” community-based innovations. It is shown that since innovation communities mainly draw on value-based bonds that appreciate openness and accessibility of knowledge as common ground for interaction, any attempt to exploit related outcomes commercially leads to friction. I conceive of these frictions as the “dilemma of entrepreneurship”.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Indeed, Giles’ (2005) analysis of a random set of collected entries from Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica shows that the number of errors included does not vary significantly between both mediums.

  2. 2.

    Please note that this chapter mainly refers to the state of knowledge in the context of innovation research. In Chap. 3, especially Sect. 3.2, I approach the matter of communities from a rather theoretical point of view.

  3. 3.

    While I will mainly draw on the organizational aspects of community-based innovation, a prominent stream of research addresses the individual motivations of people that contribute to such joint endeavors. For instance, Wasko and Faraj (2000) focus on the reasons why members of internet newsgroups generate, maintain, and exchange knowledge within these “electronic communities of practice”. They find evidence that related knowledge flows are motivated by moral obligation and community interest rather than by narrow self-interest. In their content analysis of 342 open-ended responses from participants of IT-themed newsgroups (described as “self-organizing, electronic forums where issues associated with the topic of the newsgroup are discussed”, ibid. 162), the majority of comments (42%) are associated with the specific facets of community-based interactions. These include strong desires to engage in communities of practice not primarily for social reasons but the open and reciprocal exchange of practice related knowledge within a group of like-minded members: “People in these communities feel that sharing knowledge and helping others is ‘the right thing to do,’ and people also have a desire to advance the community as a whole. However, giving back to the community in return for help was by far the most cited reason for why people participate. […] People feel that the community provides access to knowledge rather than just information, and becomes a valuable forum to receive feedback on ideas and solutions” (Wasko and Faraj 2000, 169). Contrasting the community-based notion of collectively owned and maintained knowledge with a market-based perspective of treating knowledge as a private good proprietarily owned by single organizations, the authors suggest that “knowledge flows best when seekers and experts are considered members of the same community and thus share the same values, codes, and narratives” (ibid. 170) and further conclude that “the end result is increased knowledge flows and innovation within the community” (ibid. 171).

  4. 4.

    To exemplify these tendencies for the case of Linux, Lakhani and Panetta point out that the surrounding “commercial ecosystem” was expected to reach “about $35 billion in 2008 with installations in more than 43 million computing devices ranging from PCs and servers to cell phones, routers, and super computer clusters” (Lakhani and Panetta 2007, 99). The commercial potential of OSS thus differs from the proprietary software model as not the actual products but the service of consulting and support are sold. As Kogut and Metiu describe for the case of RedHat, which is the biggest and most recognized company that provides a version of Linux along other open source applications, companies that build their business models on OSS usually compete on the basis of customer service, instead of ownership of the intellectual property (Kogut and Metiu 2001, 252).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technische Universität, Berlin, Germany

    Jan-Peter Ferdinand

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  1. Jan-Peter Ferdinand
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Ferdinand, JP. (2018). Linking Commons, Communities, and Innovation. In: Entrepreneurship in Innovation Communities. Contributions to Management Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66842-0_2

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