Is there collaboration in open collaboration? The role of producers and corporate users in Open Source software development

Innovation in open collaboration projects involves producers and users, both private and corporate, each engaging in and pairing problems with solutions. While the innovation literature has focused predominantly on motivations to contribute, we face a paucity of insights into how incentives shape the producers' and users' choice to design and contribute solutions for problems and needs expressed by others. We explore, in the case of Open Source software development, if and how different actor types and task complexity can be linked to such collaborative problem-solving, where one developer solves another's problem instead of working independently. Patterns of problem-solution pairing in a large Open Source Software development project identify corporate users as ranking first in attracting solutions to their problems. We find that collaboration occurs systematically and actors' perceived incentives are shaped inside and outside the open collaboration project, namely via options to sell complementary services to corporate users. In order to pair solutions with problems of corporate users, significant effort in understanding their needs is required from innovators, extending the viability of the open collaboration model into the domain of producer innovation that regularly incurs communication and coordination costs. Our findings advance theory on open collaboration as a unique form of organizing innovation. We discuss implications and insights for management and policy. To answer this question: How do producers and users, corporate and individual users, solve each others' problems in open collaboration communities when they do? We extend Baldwin and von Hippel's (2011) model of open collaboration and consider all three actors - producers, corporate users, and individual users, who participate in the design processes in OSS communities. ● An exploratory research design using a large set of data from a core repository within OpenStack studies 298 actors who published and completed 7470 tasks or problems, each task requiring on average 300.27 lines of code to solve. ● The findings suggest that each actor's perceived incentives for collaboration are shaped not only by the scope of the problem but also the actor type who revealed the problem. ● Users and producers create solutions for other producers and users with the likely goal to reap indirect benefits of selling complementary services from the public good. This emphasizes that contributions to the public are linked to temporally delayed benefits and option values that are nurtured strategically through the “pairing” of complementary knowledge that will translate into complementary assets that can be economically exploited. As a consequence the cost-benefit calculus and incentives to collaborate change. ● Corporate users play a unique role in consistently ranking first in attracting solutions to their problems from both producers and private users. This pattern changes the default innovation model for open collaboration in that the perceived incentives for collaboration with corporate users outweigh the costs of understanding their needs and problems. It appears that open collaboration may remain viable despite high design and communication costs.