Reusing or Reinventing The Wheel: The Search-Transfer Issue in Open Source Communities

Despite the raising awareness about the importance of open innovation communities in knowledge economies, empirical evidence about the structural determinants of knowledge reuse in these communities is lacking. In order to address this gap, the current study sets out to investigate the network-level determinants of knowledge reuse in open source projects. I suggest tracking code reuse across open source projects as a feasible and accessible proxy measure for knowledge reuse. I argue that in spite of favorable conditions, search and processing costs associated with knowledge reuse remain high enough to localize reuse behavior of open source developers. I hypothesize that network-level proximity of projects within the social network of open source community is a significant determinant of code reuse. A report on the progress of the empirical section of the research project along with some confirmatory preliminary results has been included.