Monthly Archives: February 2009

Published article in R&D Management

R&D Management published our article on the development of the Nokia Internet Tablet. A preprint draft can be downloaded from here.

Please welcome:

Stuermer, M.; Spaeth, S. & von Krogh, G., Extending private-collective innovation: a case study, <em>R & D Management</em>, 2009, 39(2), 170-191

ABSTRACT

The private-collective innovation model proposes incentives for individuals and firms to privately invest resources to create public goods innovations. Such innovations are characterized by non-rivalry and non-exclusivity in consumption. Examples include open source software, user-generated media products, drug formulas, and sport equipment designs. There is still limited empirical research on private-collective innovation. We present a case study to (1) provide empirical evidence of a case of private-collective innovation, showing specific benefits, and (2) to extend the private-collective innovation model by analyzing the hidden costs for the company involved. We examine the development of the Nokia Internet Tablet, which builds on both proprietary and open source software development, and that involves both Nokia developers and volunteers who are not employed by the company. Seven benefits for Nokia are identified, as are five hidden costs: difficulty to differentiate, guarding business secrets, reducing community entry barriers, giving up control, and organizational inertia. We examine the actions taken by the management to mitigate these costs throughout the development period.

Random FOSDEM observations and notes

  • Mark Surman from Mozilla gave a somewhat boring talk, Bdale Garbee from Debian gave a nie project overview
  • Big companies have Chief Open Source Software Officers (sun) or OSS & Linux chief Technologists (HP) nowadays.
  • Enrico Zini has an interesting DDE project, that might be useful for doing dependency analyses. Look into it
  • Who is Luca Capella from the Debian OpenMoko project?
  • Monotonous speech patterns make even interesting topics appear very boring. It is just not possible to concentrate, even with the best intentions.
  • Average head hair length at the conference is probably the same as the normal population average, but it peaks at the extreme sides of the spectrum :). The number of beards and weird hats is definitely above average.
  • People drink beer at every time of the day.

Short video of the packed main hall by Quim Gil:

5000 hackers at FOSDEM 2009 from Quim Gil on Vimeo.

FOSDEM

Sitting in the reception of the FOSDEM Coonference in Brussels. It has a very amazing atmosphere, I really like that. The one thing that is annoying is my cold. I still don’t feel very well, sneeze and cough all the time. Almut forced me to take 5 packages of handkerchiefs with me and I think I am going to use them all up.

I also missed the FOSDEM beer event yesterday, as I didnt really feel like going out. Instead I bought one beer and watched “Die Hard 2” from the bed in my hotel room. How social! 🙂

On a positive note: Taking a little eeePC and an openmoko phone with me, satisfies all my computer needs quite nicely.

Got a textmessage from Almut: Oliver was standing all by himself, holding himself to the fridge. Yay! I think we were not a day early when we secured our stair case last week…