Skill, division of labor and performance in collective inventions: Evidence from open source software

This paper investigates the skills and the division of labor among participants in collective inventions. Our analysis draws on a large sample of projects registered at Sourceforge.net, the world’s largest incubator of open source software activity. We test the hypothesis that skill variety of participants is associated with project performance. We also explore whether the level of modularization of project activities is correlated with performance. Our econometric estimations show that skill heterogeneity is associated with project survival and performance. However, the relationship between skill diversity and performance is non-monotonic. Design modularity is also positively associated with the performance of the project. Finally, the interaction between skill heterogeneity and modularity is negatively associated with performance.