Designing shared spaces for firm-community collaborations for innovation: Formal policies and coordination in open source projects

This paper adds to the growing debate on the design of the shared space between firms and communities in co-innovation processes. We investigate specific organizational design initiatives that firms can take when collaborating with online communities to nurture their joint knowledge creation process and to realize a useful output. We contend that drafting a formal policy, leaving the coordination of the joint project to others and, in case of taking on the coordination duty, dedicating an employee's full time to realize the project administrator task can help increase the amount of useful output of such collaborations. Results based on a sample of 1,099 open source software projects hosted on the platform SourceForge.net support our hypotheses.