Open collaboration

Open collaboration leading to novel organizations

January 6, 2014

[+]

(Credit: Bitcoin Project)

Open collaboration — which has brought the world Bitcoin, TEDx and Wikipedia — is likely to lead to new organizations that are not quite non-profits and not quite corporations, according to a paper by Sheen S. Levine of Columbia University and Michael J. Prietula of Emory University published in the journal Organization Science.

The authors define open collaboration as “any system of innovation or production that relies on goal-oriented yet loosely coordinated participants who interact to create a product (or service) of economic value, which they make available to contributors and non-contributors alike.”

Open collaboration emerged with open-source software less than two decades ago. Its underlying principles are now found in many other ventures. Some of them are Internet-based; others are offline, such as TEDx, medicine, and traditional scientific experimentation.