INO Seminar

Seminar by Cristina Rossi Lamastra, DIG, Politecnico di Milano

DOES FIRMS' INVOLVEMENT IN THE OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT ASK FOR NEW ORGANISATIONAL FORMS?

THE CASE OF EMPLOYEES' EMPOWERMENT

Abstract

The Open Source (OS) phenomenon has evolved from an ideological-oriented movement to a well grounded economic reality, involving more and more firms in the software sector. Software companies are getting increasingly aware that OS communities constitute an important source of new ideas and knowledge, as their permeable boundaries and self-organisation behaviours make them a powerful locus of collective innovation. Given the peculiar structure of OS communities, firms aiming at proficiently interacting with them have to design governing mechanisms allowing overcome the paradoxical tension between control and cooperation. In this framework, the paper explores which firm-specific characteristics and features of firm-community interaction shape the adoption of new organisational forms, leading companies to delegate to their employees discretionary control over the relationships with OS communities. A set of hypotheses, grounded in the wide literature on Organisational Design, is developed and tested on a dataset drawn from a survey taken in 2004 on 290 European software firms doing business out of OS. The estimates of a two-steps Heckman Probit model reveal that the likelihood of empowerment increases with firms’ size, number of OS product categories offered, and radical innovation outcomes. Conversely, the number of OS projects the firm participates in negatively affects the delegation of decision authority to employees.

Paper joint with:

Massimo G. Colombo, DIG, Politecnico di Milano

Evila Piva, DIG, Politecnico di Milano