Publications
Generating Value by Working With User Communities: An Analysis of Financial Market Returns to Corporate Open Source Code Contributions, 2025, R&D Management
Users are an important source of innovation. Scholars suggest that established firms can gain product-related insights by working with user communities and studies documenting various ways of working with users, as well as managers' interest in doing so. However, the link between working with user communities for product development purposes and its value for firms is not established. Coupling the use of event study methodology and regression analysis, I examine stock market reactions to corporate announcements stating that the firm is contributing software code to the community. I find that when firms state that generating insights from users regarding new and improved features and functionality is a motivation for contributing code, the market's reaction to the announcement is greater than for announcements that do not state this goal. Additional analysis provides evidence supporting the hypothesis that firms can and do benefit by working with user communities and achieve increased R&D efficiency, which leads to greater firm value.
Designing Shared Spaces for Firm-Community Collaborations for Innovation: Formal Policies and Coordination in Open Source Projects, 2021, Creativity and Innovation Management 30(1), pp.164-181 (with Francesco Rullani and Cristina Rossi-Lamastra).
This paper adds to the growing debate on the design of the shared space between firms and communities in co-innovation processes. We investigate specific organizational design initiatives that firms can take when collaborating with online communities to nurture their joint knowledge creation process and to realize a useful output. We contend that drafting a formal policy, leaving the coordination of the joint project to others and, in case of taking on the coordination duty, dedicating an employee’s full time to realize the project administrator task can help increase the amount of useful output of such collaborations. Results based on a sample of 1,099 open source software projects hosted on the platform SourceForge.net support our hypotheses.
The Impact of Open Source Software Commercialization on Firm Value, 2015, Industry and Innovation 22(1), pp.1-17
Vendors of proprietary software products are increasingly moving to business models inspired by open source software (OSS). This paper investigates sources of heterogeneity in value appropriation associated with commercializing OSS. Specifically, I suggest that the relationship between a firm’s OSS releases and its value depends critically on its stocks of protection mechanisms for intellectual property rights, such as software patents and software trademarks. I find that while software patent stocks positively affect the relationship between a firm’s OSS product portfolio and its value, software trademark stocks have a negative effect on this relationship.
Working Papers
I want to Break Free: Using Masked Defection to Escape Typecasts in the Movie Industry (with Hamid Mazloomi, Oliver Alexy, Xian Xu, Hana Milanov)
Following typecasting theory (Faulkner, 1983; Zuckerman, Kim, Ukanwa, & von Rittmann, 2003; Zuckerman, 2005), candidates who aim to get a foot into the door in labor markets to launch a successful career are well advised to assume a simple and focused identity. The underlying premise is that labor markets are dominated by beliefs about the distribution of skill. While being typecast can be beneficial for candidates aiming to work consistently in the same categories, it also imposes a significant mobility barrier on those who want to develop across categorical boundaries (Zuckerman, 2005). For candidates who wish to diversify their offering – such as movie actors who want to explore their creative talent – most literature suggests that candidates have little opportunity, and in particular little agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). In this study, we suggest that actors may proactively affect features that bind them to their typecast in a way that they may cross categorical boundaries and reduce, if not eliminate, audience penalties they should receive. We test our hypotheses in the feature-film industry, a setting in which typecasting should have particularly strong effects.