Abstract
This research aims to trace the formation and development of community- based innovation. Based on a 14-month ethnographic study in 10 open source communities, I systematically summarized the working mechanisms of open source software development. I identified four fundamental factors that underpin open source communities, including economy of community-based maintenance, iterative generation of value, incentives of professional networking, and entrepreneurship of core teams. A comprehensive framework incorporating these four factors is then constructed, which provides a dynamic process-based snowball model to explain the heterogeneity of open source communities. This perspective can even be applied in a broader research context to analyze the uncertainty and dynamic generation of knowledge transfer and to study the iterative nature of technological innovation. In contrast to previous literature, my field research suggests that there is convergence rather than divergence between community-based innovation and intra-firm R&D, thus opening up many possibilities for future research, such as comparing open source with closed source and exploring hybrid models of organizational innovation.
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