International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes

International Journal of Open Source Software & Processes
An Official Publication of the Information Resources Management
Association - New in 2009
www.igi-global.com/ijossp

Editor-in-Chief: Stefan Koch, Vienna University of Economics and BA, Austria
Published: Quarterly (both in Print and Electronic form)

MISSION OF IJOSSP:

The International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes (IJOSSP) aims to publish high-quality original research articles on the large field of open source software and processes. The primary mission is to enhance our understanding of this field and neighbouring areas by providing a focused outlet for rigorous research employing a multitude of approaches.

COVERAGE OF IJOSSP:

IJOSSP adopts an inclusive approach in its coverage. Therefore papers from software engineering, management, sociology and other areas, as well as different research approaches are welcome. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Characteristics of open source software projects, products and processes
• Case studies of open source projects, their participants and/or their development process
• Communication and coordination in open source projects
• Open source adoption and quality
• Open source software development processes
• User-centered innovation processes
• Economics of a distributed innovation process
• Motivation of participants in open source projects and other distributed development efforts
• Business models for open source and other community-created artifacts
• Evolution of both open source software artefacts and open source communities
• Legal issues of open source software
• Implications of open source software for functional areas like public administration or teaching
• Usage and adoption of open source software in different application areas and/or countries
• Economic analyses of open source
• Open science and open knowledge
• Customer co-creation and user participation in (software) design
• Open source software and processes research methods, tools, and data repositories

Please note that despite the title, IJOSSP acknowledges, embraces and covers other respective forms and definitions of similar nature, like free software or libre software. Therefore, each occurrence of open source should be read as free/libre/open source.

SUBMITTING TO IJOSSP:

Prospective authors should note that only original and previously unpublished manuscripts will be considered. Interested authors should consult the journal's guidelines for manuscript submissions. To ensure the high quality of published material, IJOSSP utilizes a double-blind peer review process. Upon receipt of the manuscript, an associate editor and two reviewers are selected from the Editorial Review Board of the Journal. Final decision regarding acceptance/revision/rejection will be based on the reviews received from the reviewers.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Paul David, Stanford University, USA & The University of Oxford, UK
Brian Fitzgerald, University of Limerick, Ireland
Joachim Henkel, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany
Eric von Hippel, MIT Sloan School of Management, USA
Georg von Krogh, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Karim Lakhani, Harvard Business School, USA
Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Jean-Michel Dalle, Universite Paris-Dauphine (Paris IX), France
Ernesto Damiani, University of Milan, Italy
Joe Feller, University College Cork, Ireland
Scott Hissam, Carnegie Mellon, USA
Greg Madey, University of Notre Dame, USA
Dirk Riehle, SAP Labs LLC, USA
Gregorio Robles, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
Walt Scacchi, University of California - Irvine, USA
Sebastian Spaeth, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Ioannis Stamelos, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

EDITORIAL REVIEW BOARD

Ioannis Antoniadis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Evangelia Berdou, University of Sussex, UK
Cornelia Boldyreff, University of Lincoln, UK
Andrea Capiluppi, University of Lincoln, UK
Carlo Daffara, Conecta Research, Italy
Marina Fiedler, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Munich, Germany
Daniel German, University of Victoria, Canada
Stefan Haefliger, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Israel Herraiz, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
Nicolas Jullien, TELECOM Bretagne, France
Sandeep Krishnamurthy, University of Washington, USA
George Kuk, Nottingham University Business School, UK
Jan Ljungberg, Gothenburg University, Sweden
Bjoern Lundell, University of Skoevde, Sweden
Martin Michlmayr, Hewlett-Packard, Austria
Sandro Morasca, Universita degli Studi dell'Insubria, Italy
Gustaf Neumann, Vienna University of Economics and BA, Austria
Bulent Ozel, Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey
Barbara Russo, Free University of Bolzano/Bozen, Italy
Suleyman Sowe, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Megan Squire, Elon University, USA
Brian Still, Texas Tech University, USA
Stefan Strecker, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Giancarlo Succi, Free University of Bolzano/Bozen, Italy
Frank van der Linden, Philips Medical Systems, The Netherlands
Andreas Wiebe, Vienna University of Economics and BA, Austria
Donald Wynn Jr., University of Dayton, USA

Managing open innovation through online communities

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks, so (a week late) I’m posting my final notes on EURAM 2007.

EURAM 2007 ended Saturday [May 21] and with it two tracks that solicited papers on open innovation. To complete our EURAM 2007 coverage, I’ve asked fellow OI blogger Vareska van de Vrande to publish her thoughts on the other track (#12), which she attended and co-chaired.

I attended all but two sessions of the track “Managing Open Innovation through Online Communities” (#15). Although I’ve already blogged on some aspects, I wanted to provide an overall summary. Sebastian Späth of ETH Zürich has also blogged on the track.

Assessing the 14 presented papers (one was a no-show), the track had three main topical themes:

• Open source communities. At least six papers fit this category, which is not surprising since the organizers are all open source researchers (as were the two keynote speakers).
• Online communities other than open source, mainly around consumer products, but also Wikipedia, and web logs. Depending on how you classify it, another 4-6 papers.
• User innovation (of the von Hippel sense), which included both the open source and other communities. The example that stood out was music mods but this seemed to be the one common innovation perspective through the majority of the papers.

The keynotes turned out to be a nice complement to each other, one emphasizing open innovation and the other user innovation and online communities.

My own keynote discussed how open innovation links directly to the open source phenomenon when companies are involved. But (except for the paper presented by Cristina Rossi) the connections of these papers to open innovation and the work of Henry Chesbrough were more implied than explicit.

Of interests to readers of this blog, there certainly are research opportunities here to do more with open innovation. One of the criticisms of the open innovation paradigm (beginning with Chesbrough’s 2003 book) was that the examples were so heavily weighted towards IT that many questioned whether it generalized beyond IT. Last year’s special issue of R&D Management provided additional evidence for open innovation beyond IT. But the work in this conference on user innovation shows how more work can be done on consumer-centric user innovation — which, to the degree it provides innovation to a firm, also qualifies as open innovation.

The other keynote came from one of the leading experts on user innovation — Karim Lakhani, former von Hippel student and now a Harvard b-school prof. His closing keynote (among other things) challenged us to study the innovation role of communities with more precision and depth. Are communities another organizational form? What holds them together? What do we gain from all the various theoretical lenses that have been used to study communities?

As Lakhani alluded to in his slides (I couldn’t attend his talk), one problem with the papers and the field is that we sometimes use the term “innovation” too loosely. There is the old question of whether an open source re-implementation of existing software really qualifies as a technological innovation: Apache was breaking new ground from day one, but the impetus for Linux (and GNU) was to create a Unix knock-off with different IP rights. One of the track’s papers described a viral marketing effort as user innovation, although this could still be plausible if we consider that the innovation process includes interpreting and applying innovations, not just their design and production.

Overall, the online communities track demonstrated the strength of a special interest track system, in that there were synergies (network effects :-) of having so much similar research and researchers in one room for 2 1/2 days rather than tiny pockets randomly scattered throughout a conference. The feedback for open source and user innovation research was exemplary, even if the open innovation knowledge in the room wasn’t nearly as strong (perhaps because they were all in track #12).

Some of the papers are expected to be combined into a special issue of Industry and Innovation to be published in Spring 2008. More details later.

Technorati Tags: EURAM 2007, open innovation, open source, user innovation

Software open innovation without open source

In my book chapter with Scott Gallagher analyzing open source as an example of open innovation, we were challenged two years ago by co-editor Henry Chesbrough to more clearly delineate the overlap between the two constructs — including examples of IT innovations that fit in one category but not the other. It turns out that the resulting typology — Figure 5.1 in our 2006 book — has well stood the test of time. I used it again this week in my keynote speech at EURAM, in this case to introduce open source researchers to open innovation concepts.

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).

The company involved in this is called Propellerhead Software of Sweden. Even if the name is not familiar to readers, anyone who’s walked into a guitar store (such as Guitar Center) in the US has seen their Reason software, providing a software-only simulation of all the great guitars and amplifiers during the seminal rock & roll era of the 1960s and 1970s — sounds originally created using wirewrap components, discrete components, or even tubes.

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