Individual Interaction and Innovation Capabilities: Exploration and Exploitation in Open Source Software Communities

This paper analyzes the micro-foundation for development of innovation capabilities in an open innovation context. To generate our results we employ an unbalanced panel of 2,598 Open Source Software developers working on projects hosted on the SourceForge online community over 28 months. We theorize how interaction in a self-organized community translates into individuals communicative behaviors. Next, we investigate empirically how individual interaction affects individual behaviors, and how the difference in individual behavior maps into community-level capabilities. We hypothesize that the type of media through which individuals interact influences the amount of resources accumulated for community exploration rather than exploitation. Our estimations show that the more community interaction is undertaken through verbal communication, the less the resources allocated to exploration and the more to exploitation, while communication based on exchange of artifacts e.g. patch files leads to the opposite results. Finally, we draw theoretical conclusions and offer managerial implications based on our study. JEL codes: O31, L86, M00 1 Individual Interaction and Innovation Capabilities Exploration and Exploitation in Open Source Software Communities DRUID Summer Conference 2010 London Word count: main text 8.250