Software platforms anchor vast global communities of users, application developers, device manufacturers, content providers, advertisers, and others. They drive innovation by enabling entrepreneurs, often anywhere in the world, to develop “applications” and to reach all the users of the...

There is a growing discussion of risks when software development is outsourced. In order to assess the extent of those risks, one needs to know the value of that concerned software. Software is an intangible good, and the value of intangibles is based on the income they are expected to generate...

Following the discussion on the role of Internet in the formation of ties across space, this paper seeks to supplement recent findings on location-dependent preferential attachment online. For this purpose, instead of looking at egonetworks, we look at networks of online communities specifically...

It is often presumed there are benefits from growing numbers of buyers and sellers around a platform, or “network effects.” While the benefits of more buyers are self-evident, the effects of ever-increasing numbers of sellers of complementary goods (“complementors”) perhaps deserve...

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...

The "community-based" model has generated many of the innovations we use on a daily basis. The social structure created by this model has cultivated many entrepreneurial ventures and even seeded new industries and product categories. The model is based upon the open, voluntary, and collaborative...

The Open Source model of peer production, sharing, revision, and peer review has distilled and labeled the most successful human creative habits into a techno- political movement. This distillation has had costs and benefits. It has been difficult to court mainstream acceptance for such a tangle...

Open source communities are groups of sometimes hundreds if not thousands of individuals with different interests, backgrounds and motives. Many of them are volunteers who are not paid to participate in the communities. Furthermore, many never get to see each other in real life. They meet...

Open-source software(OSS) programs (e.g. LINUX, Apache) provide access to the source code to any interested party. This leads to a distributed innovation model where users actively participate in the development of the product. The main purpose of this paper is to help managers who have to...

It is often presumed that bringing more members on board a multi-sided platform will stimulate value creation. Here I study the thousands of software producers building applications (“apps”) on leading handheld computer platforms (1999-2004). Consistent with past theory, I find a lock-step...