On the Division of Labor in Open Innovation Teams: An Empirical Analysis

We study how open innovation communities achieve division of labor without authoritative task allocation. We propose that co-specialization in communities is (co )determined by the norm of reciprocity that peers can expect from founders. Founders receiving contributions can reciprocate by gifting to others’ projects or by managing contributions to grow their own projects optimally. Employing data from GitHub, we find that only the latter (non-equivalent) reciprocal behavior leads to efficient division of labor and project growth. We show that skill variation among community members and the amount of attention that projects receive moderate our baseline finding. We elaborate on the implications for strategists assessing the viability of communities as complementary assets. We discuss our study’s relevance for organizational and social network scholars exploring communities more broadly."