Several scholars as well as industry professionals have claimed that there is a "software-biased shift" in the nature and direction of innovation in that software development is a core part of innovation activities in firms across a wide array of industries. Empirical firm-level evidence of such...

An extensive empirical literature indicates that, even without formal intellectual property rights, innovators enjoy a variety of first-mover advantages and that `imitation' is itself a costly activity. There is also accumulating evidence that an `open' approach to knowledge production can...

Open source software and open innovation are an important resource for today’s industries. Communities collaboratively create different kind of publicly available value, boosting innovation and also technology. However, whereas this value is generated and captured by various involved parties,...

Crowdsourcing is a concept that first appeared in an article written by Jeff Howe in 2006 in the Wired Magazine in which the author illustrates the emerging phenomena of the outsourcing of various activities by companies to an undefined generally large group of people on the Internet in the form...

By an example of the Linux system, I introduce a concept of the Virtual Production Line (VPL) as an extension of an assembly line, brought in by Henry Ford in motor industry a hundred years ago, and demonstrate its usefulness in an analysis of open source software development. The line is...

Searching for external knowledge has frequently been characterized as crucial for firm success. However, little is known about how the direction of search strategies influences innovation performance. In this paper, we argue that firms need to specialize their search strategy and that its...