Simulation-Based Study of Community Governance and Conflict Management in Emerging Global Participatory Science Communities

Despite significant research in open innovation, much less is known about why and how collective creativity emerges in open source scientific communities, as relatively little is known about organizing processes in such cyber-enabled Global Participatory Science (GPS) communities. One of the significant problems in understanding emergence of innovation involves how GPS communities govern and coordinate to maximize innovation output. We conduct an agent simulation study to examine the impact of culture and conflict management styles on collective creativity. Findings suggest that decentralized coordination schemes such as emergent selection such as found in utility communities and moderate degrees of assertiveness and cooperation for conflict management result in higher incidence of innovation.