We develop a model of how end-users, an understudied source of entrepreneurship, create, evaluate, share, and exploit their ideas. Our model explicitly examines the interactive processes that precede firm formation, and by doing so highlights the emergent nature of entrepreneurial activity. We...

Open source software projects rely on the voluntary efforts of thousands of software developers, yet we know little about the factors that drive and shape initial and continued developer participation. This paper inductively derives a framework for understanding participation--reasons to create...

The knowledge context is the social, economic, and organizational setting within which an individual is situated. This paper ties together observations from three distinct empirical areas of the entrepreneurship literature--academic entrepreneurship, employee entrepreneurship, and user...

Academics and practitioners have long been interested in understanding the sources and causes of innovative activity and the relationship between innovation and industrial change. Existing theory assumes innovative activity to be the domain of firms and research institutions, and commercial...

Knowledge acquisition activities occurring after entry may be just as critical to firm survival as pre-existing knowledge and experience, because knowledge acquisition activities enable the augmentation of existing knowledge and the exploration and pursuit of new strategic directions. Drawing...

The actions of collectives who primarily meet on-line have recently captured the attention of the media, general public, business executives, and academics. File-sharing, open-source, and computer viruses are all carried out by loosely bounded collectives, rather than by firms or other formal...

Users of products and services often make product-related innovations that become taken-for-granted product features. Early research in this area found that while product users--be they firms or individuals--innovated, it was existing manufacturers who commercialized the innovation. Users...