All around us, there are signs that we are entering an era of unprecedented technological and societal change. Online auctions, crowdsourced encyclopedias, open source software and peer-to-peer sharing of music files were early heralds of a new way of organizing human interactions. More...

Most digital platforms are inherently versatile partly because their software code can be modified, but primarily because they are designed as open-ended modular stacks whose affordances increase with the variety of functionalities provided by the upper layers, without needing to rewire or...

This paper tries to shine a light on the seemingly paradoxical role of resource scarcity as help, rather than hindrance, to innovation. It does so by showing that Minecraft's remarkable success has been the result of a fertile set of design and business model choices, some of which were due to...

This paper intends to illustrate and make more explicit the decentralization argument put forward in the literature on platform leadership. The analysis shows that in the digital economy, where rapid scalability and evolve-ability are so important, decentralization has played a crucial role in...

Inspired by the open source software (OSS) movement, Wikipedia has gone further than any OSS project in decentralizing its quality control task. This is seen by many as a fatal flaw. In this short paper, I will try to show that it is rather a shrewd and fertile design choice. First, I will...

The outsourcing of innovation activities, geographic clustering of firms, and mobility of labor each allow knowledge to circulate within industries. This study investigates knowledge spillover mechanisms’ effects on industry innovativeness and profit, and how these effects change with the...

Inspired by the work of Eric von Hippel on ‘free innovation’ and Stefania Milan on activist movements, I define ‘beyonders’ as agents who express their dissatisfaction about a current economic regime not by trying to change it, as innovative insiders or outsiders would, but by trying to...

Nothing facilitates large-scale collaboration as the prospect of inclusive, all-win games. Modern humans have become much better at large-scale collaboration because they have discovered, or invented, a broad range of collective goods that are easy to share and become more valuable the more they...