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- Giovacchini, Elia, 1982-
(författare)
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Weaving the symbiotic relationship : A longitudinal study of the maintenance of a firm-sponsored open source community
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The phenomenon of firm sponsored open source software (OSS) projects has become an established and widely used approach to develop and release new products in the software industry. In this arrangement, a sponsoring firm and a community establish a relationship to create a common project. When a firm fully commits to this type of development, it enters into a symbiotic relationship with its OSS community. This implies their mutual dependence and the presence of competing demands, both for openness – so that everyone can contribute to the common project and appropriate value from it, and for control – to affect the project content and direction. Although earlier studies have recognized the paradoxical nature of these competing and interrelated demands, so far there have been only limited attempts to understand its implications for maintaining such a symbiotic relationship.Hence, the aim of this thesis is to deepen our understanding of the symbiotic relationship by answering the following question: How is a symbiotic firm-community relationship maintained?To address this question, a qualitative research design is adopted through a single in depth longitudinal case study of the relationship between a Nordic European firm and its OSS community throughout their 13 plus years of history, from 2002 till 2015, by combining archival resources, observations and interviews. Recognizing the nature of these competing demands, a paradox lens is introduced as a way to frame the firm-community relationship.This allows identification of six paradoxical tensions that affect the relationship and five responses used to address the paradoxical tensions as they manifest. Building on these different insights a conceptual model of the firm-community relationship is developed. The model highlights that responses in many instances become the cause of subsequent paradoxical tensions. This insight underpinned the search for an alternative understanding of maintenance beyond instances of single tensions and response, by suggesting three different approaches to maintaining the firm-community relationship, namely, improvising, separating and weaving. This study contributes to extant literature by giving prominence to the relationship as a conduit of interaction in which both the firm and community should be able to extend their influence while also being subject to the influence of each other. In particular, based on the insights of the weaving approach, I suggest understanding maintenance as a process of creation, where quite apart from the design of the relationship, there is a need to reconsider the features of key actors, not solely in terms of motivation, but also including their knowledge, skill and ways of thinking.
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| 2. |
- von Schantz, Hanna, 1974-
(författare)
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Well, that makes sense! : Investigating opportunity development in a technology start-up
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Digital technologies have profoundly reshaped many industries in the past years and we are continuously witnessing the creation of new ventures designing and serving entirely new markets. At the heart of these initiatives lies decisions to act, take risk and pursue ideas in the form of entrepreneurial opportunities. Much of the research on the journey from ideas to market has advanced from the idea that entrepreneurial agency emerges at the nexus of individuals and opportunities. In most academic work, opportunities are either assumed to be exogenous to the individual or socially constructed. Despite many valuable contributions in the field, the construct as it has traditionally been used only accounts for and explains opportunities once they have been realized. Hence, the established perspectives fall short in informing our understanding of how individuals actually act and make decisions that lead up to the identification and exploitation of opportunities that lack tangible premises. The question is therefore, how do we define and understand entrepreneurial opportunities before they have been realized and how do we make the construct empirically operable? The present study challenges and extends the conventional views of entrepreneurial opportunities by investigating what they are and how they emerge and evolve over time. By drawing upon in-depth qualitative data from a longitudinal study of the new venture creation process of a digital TV and film production firm, the thesis provides a reconceptualization of the opportunity construct. External enablers, a new venture idea, a business model and opportunity confidence are suggested as components that clarify what aspiring entrepreneurs actually mean when they talk about opportunities. Departing from these components, the thesis provides a framework describing opportunity development as an iterative process evolving through modes of sensemaking, sensegiving and sensebreaking. This framework adds to entrepreneurial process studies by extending the individual-opportunity nexus to include the actions and interactions between the entrepreneurs and the external environment in which they operate. The results lay a foundation for future theorizing and empirical inquiry into the early stages of new venture creation.
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