User-Generated Open Source Products: Founder's Social Capital and Time to Product Release

Girish Mallapragada (), Rajdeep Grewal () and Gary Lilien ()
Additional contact information
Girish Mallapragada: Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405
Rajdeep Grewal: Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802
Gary Lilien: Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802

Marketing Science, 2012, vol. 31, issue 3, 474-492

Abstract: Volunteer users employ collaborative Internet technologies to develop open source products, a form of user-generated content, where time to product release is a crucial measure of project success. The open source community features two separate but related subcommunities: developer users who contribute time and effort to develop products and end users who act as collaborative testers and provide feedback. We develop hypotheses concerning how the location of the project's founders in the social network of developer users, the interplay of developer users and end users, and project and product characteristics affect time to product release. We use data on 817 development projects from SourceForge, a large open source community forum, to calibrate a split hazard model to test the hypotheses. That model supports the two-community conceptualization and most of the related hypotheses. The results have theoretical and managerial implications; for example, a pivotal position of founders in the developer user community can reduce time to product release by up to 31 and projects in which users are more engaged can experience an 11 time to product release compared with those projects in which they are not.

Keywords: user-generated products; product development; social networks; open source; innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mksc.1110.0690 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormksc:v:31:y:2012:i:3:p:474-492

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Marketing Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().