User communities represent a unique organizing structure for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. They are organizations composed primarily of users working collaboratively, voluntarily, and with minimal oversight to freely and openly develop and exchange knowledge around a common artifact. The...

Universities are widely recognized as a critical source of technological innovation and are heralded for the entrepreneurial ventures cultivated within their walls. To date, most research has focused on academic entrepreneurship—new ventures that spin out of academic laboratories. However,...

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...

With the emergence of digital multi-sided platform (DMSP) ecosystems, scholars are revisiting core strategic frameworks created in traditional settings. We examine how variation in pioneer firm characteristics may impact two critical platform governance strategies — single vs. multi-firm...