No Allergy to Making Money? Communities, Commercialization, and Innovation

Despite the increasing importance of online communities in innovation, there is little research about the process by which the innovations and products generated in these communities are commercialized. Further, what limited literature exists on the subject establishes contrasting expectations for how community affiliation may affect the commercialization choices of individuals. Examining the Open Source Software (OSS) community, I theorize about the mechanisms that might influence how commercialization occurs and test those mechanisms using both a quasi-experiment and a survey of OSS developers. I find a decreased propensity towards commercialization among community members, which is due to a novel mechanism. Rather than having an anti-commercial perspective, as might be expected in OSS, community membership is instead associated with positive views towards commercialization, as long as that commercialization is undertaken by others. Individuals who are members of communities are less likely to commercialize because they have more difficulty identifying and acting on commercialization opportunities themselves. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the study of community-based innovation.

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