However, one thing bothered Scott and me. We were very interested in game mods as something that was definitely open innovation, but (except in rare cases) did not really use the open source IP model. We were not sure whether it was representative of a broader phenomenon or just an interesting anomaly. There is so much about the video game industry that is anomoulous — despite the industry’s huge economic significance — that we thought this could be just one more.
It turns out there’s an N of at least 2, because music mods seem to work almost the same way as game mods. I learned about this from two papers at the EURAM 2007 online communities track. This research has been pioneered by Lars Bo Jeppesen, although the 2nd paper (by Linus Dahlander and Lars Frederiksen) did not involve “Lars Bo” (as everyone called him this week).
![[Reason Logo] [Reason Logo]](http://www.propellerheads.se/products/reason/img/logo_reason.gif)
Propellerhead has an active community of user-contributed content — special sounds and sound effects. Jeppesen said that a typical computer-controlled musical instrument would take 100-150 hours to develop by an experienced Propellerhead engineer. They have attracted free some 100 significant modifications by users. Of course, this is exactly the user innovation paradigm of Eric von Hippel of MIT.
Jeppesen and Frederiksen already published a 2006 paper on this in Organization Science (DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1050.0156). I had previously read parts of the article, but somehow never made the connection between their research and the demo I saw of Reason and the Line 6 Toneport at the Guitar Center booth during the 2006 and 2007 Macworld Expo.
Technorati Tags: conferences, EURAM 2007, open innovation, open source, user innovation
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