MORSe (Management and Organization Research Seminars): "Coordinating distributed innovation processes: the case of the automotive and open source software industries"
Institute of Management and Organisation
Start date: 9 April 2009
End date: 10 April 2009
9th of April 2009
Room 251
12.30 to 14.00
Francesco Rullani (Copenhagen Business School)
Presentation of the paper "Coordinating distributed innovation processes: the case of the automotive and open source software industries"
Abstract
This paper casts light on the question how coordination of distributed innovation processes is achieved by comparing the automotive and open source software industries. These industries represent very different settings of distributed innovation, one a traditional industries that has ‘opened up’ innovation, the other the extreme case of network innovation. They have not so far been object of a comparative study. We present a comparative literature review, and then draw on empirical research in the automotive and open source software industries to compare how coordination is achieved in each. We apply qualitative methods to the auto industry, where we draw from a 10-year case study of a major European auto firm. We apply quantitative methods to the open source software industry, where we do an econometric analysis of 5810 projects registered on SourceForge. We find a surprising similarity regarding how coordination is provided in both cases: the use of templates at early stages of the project, which foster coordination of joint search processes by distributed actors through acting on their representations of search trajectories and eliminating some of the potential trajectories.
