Collaborative Organizing for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Abstract

With the rise of the knowledge economy and an increasing demand for innovation, collaboration is gaining prominence as an organizing principle. This habilitation thesis centers on the question how individuals collaborate to innovate and to explore entrepreneurial opportunities. My coauthors and I draw on both organizational and psychological theories to study this important phenomenon in three empirical contexts: open-source software development communities, new venture teams, and research and development collaborations. Individually, each empirical study in this thesis focuses on one of the fundamental problems of collaboration (i.e., goal asymmetry, information asymmetry, and conflict) and their corresponding solutions (i.e., self-selection, learning, and peer-to-peer conflict resolution). Collectively, the ten articles (nine empirical and one conceptual) aim at developing a systematic understanding of the mechanisms that enable collaboration across different innovation paradigms.