The Dynamics of Collaborative Innovation: Exploring the tension between knowledge novelty
from Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
This event has passed.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008, 12:30pm - 2:30pm
The success of open source software communities and Wikipedia have generated much interest in the mechanisms supporting collaborative innovation. These collaborative innovation systems are distinguished by their free revealing of knowledge and the ability of actors to reinterpret and repurpose existing knowledge created by others in making their own new creations. However, there is a tension between the need of the collaborative system to have access to knowledge so that it can be used by others and the incentives of any individual to be recognized as a top performer in a collaborative system. We study this tension in a unique setting involving a "wiki-like" collaborative programming contest involving over 100 contributors and over 3900 attempts at creating the "best" software solution to a programming problem over a one week period of activity.
We find that the relationship between reuse of code by others (i.e. social value of a contribution) has an "inverse-U" relationship with code novelty; initially, new code helps in adoption but too much novelty hinders reuse. Conversely, the social value of a contribution exhibits a "U" relationship when considering the extent of borrowed code in that contribution. Analysis of the individual performance in this setting reveals that the probability of being a top ranked contribution, at any point in time, increases as both novelty and reuse in the code increases, with reuse having twice as much an effect. We also find that increasing complexity of a contribution has a negative effect on both social value and top performance. We discuss the implications of these findings to the emerging literature on collaborative innovation.
More information...
Pingbacks ( Use this URL to link to this event: http://www.marksguide.com/event/2330/ )
