  The principles of open collaboration for innovation (and production), once
distinctive to open source software, are now found in many other ventures. Some
of these ventures are internet-based: Wikipedia, online forums and communities.
Others are off-line: in medicine, science, and everyday life. Such ventures
have been affecting traditional firms, and may represent a new organizational
form. Despite the impact of such ventures, questions remain about their
operating principles and performance. Here we define open collaboration (OC),
the underlying set of principles, and propose that it is a robust engine for
innovation and production. First, we review multiple OC ventures and identify
four defining principles. In all instances, participants create goods and
services of economic value, they exchange and reuse each other's work, they
labor purposefully with just loose coordination, and they permit anyone to
contribute and consume. These principles distinguish OC from other
organizational forms, such as firms or cooperatives. Next, we turn to
performance. To understand the performance of OC, we develop a computational
model, combining innovation theory with recent evidence on human cooperation.
We identify and investigate three elements that affect performance: the
cooperativeness of participants, the diversity of their needs, and the degree
to which the goods are rival (subtractable). Through computational experiments,
we find that OC performs well even in seemingly harsh environments: when
cooperators are a minority, free riders are present, diversity is lacking, or
goods are rival. We conclude that OC is viable and likely to expand into new
domains. The findings also inform the discussion on new organizational forms,
collaborative and communal.
