Communities of innovation
Sawhney and Prandelli (2000) proposed the model of communities of creation as a new governance mechanism for managing knowledge found in different companies for the purpose of innovation.
[1][9] Stacey (1969) observed that the term ‘community’ has been used by some to connote social relations in a defined geographical area, and by others to stress the feeling of belonging to a group.
Finally, if the funding is approved, the group dynamics of the community of innovation then becomes formalized within the organization, bringing about the development and implementation of new products or services within the macro-process of convergence management.
[13] Drivers of organizational innovativeness include team processes and external knowledge (Rose et al., 2016) and networking (Lewis et al., 2018).
They, therefore, have the potential to contribute to organizational ambidexterity, which refers to the organization's dual capabilities of managing the current business and being flexible and adaptable to meet future changes and demands.
Prime examples of open source software created through communities of innovation include OpenOffice, Python, Blender, GIMP, GNOME, Apache, PostgreSQL and PHP, besides Linux.
[19] To substantiate their argument they put forth the case of how "thousands of talented volunteers, dispersed across organizational and geographical boundaries, collaborate via the Internet to produce a knowledge-intensive, innovative product of high quality": the Linux kernel (Lee and Cole 2003, p. 633).
They note that, as illustrated by the Linux case, "the advent of the Internet and Web-based technologies has enabled specialized communities to convene, interact, and share resources extensively via electronic interfaces," even across firms' boundaries (Lee and Cole 2003, p. 633).
The catchment area is therefore much larger and the critical mass of software engineers required to develop and maintain the Linux project was therefore achievable.
According to Henry Chesbrough, over the twentieth century, the closed innovation paradigm was overtaken by the theory of open innovation, which emphasizes the significantly higher importance of external resources[20] – thanks to an increasing trend towards globalization, new market participants, and simultaneously shorter product life cycles with correspondingly increasing R&D costs.
[21] When the most popular Open Source tools and applications – developed through collaboration among their respective communities of innovation (such as software like Linux, Apache Web Server, PostgresSQL and PHP) were compared with similar proprietary software, Gartner found that open source bested or equaled the quality of their proprietary cousins and that many open source developers and advocates are gainfully employed and at very little risk of losing future work prospects.
[citation needed] According to the Technology and Innovation Management Review, open innovation generally provides the following benefits: Broader base of ideas, Technological synergy, Improvement of the internal learning capacity through the transfer of external knowledge and learning routines and Use of intellectual property as strategic assets.
[22] There is evidence that, contrary to the popular belief, communities of innovation such as those in open source software, are not a recent development.
[17] There are many examples in history in which innovators have used collective invention as in the cases of textile machinery, steam engines, and the production of iron and steel.
This demonstrates the cultural shift that caused the "heroic inventor" to be nationally celebrated in Britain and all Western countries.
[17] According to economic historian Robert Allen, the proliferation of knowledge sharing in the iron district had two plausible reasons.
This possibly made revealing technical information freely a profitable activity from the individual firm's point of view.
Bessen and Nuvolari (2011) mention that "... as the technology matures, the nature of firms rivalry, their willingness to share knowledge and their use of patents correspondingly change.
In particular, knowledge sharing is more likely to occur during the early phases of technology or where local innovation has little effect on worldwide prices.
