Biografia del relatore
Francesco Rullani
Education
Since October 2004 at Stanford University, Stanford (USA), as visiting researcher.
Since October 2003 at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa (Italy), working in the research activity "Processi di entrata nell'industria del software" [Entry processes in the software industry] relative to the program ECONCHANGE - "New Technologies and the new economy: microfoundations of organisation and institutional change in Europe".
Since September 2002 at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa (Italy), as a 3rd year PhD student in the Economics and Management Program (English taught program).
December 2001- August 2002 at Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, Milan (Italy), following as junior researcher two European Community funded projects: DEEDS (Digital Europe: E - Business and Sustainable Development) and ENGIME (Economic Growth and Innovation in Multicultural Environments)
April 8, 2002. Degree in Economics at Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Italy. Final dissertation: "Institutions and knowledge production. The open source community case", supervisor: prof. Carlo Carraro, final grade 110/110 summa cum laude.
Salvatore Torrisi
Education
Salvatore Torrisi has obtained his PhD from the Science and Technology Policy Research (SPRU), University of Sussex, Brighton, UK and his Laurea degree in Economics from Bocconi University, Milan, Italy.
Teaching activity
Associate Professor (with tenure) of 'Economics and Management', Università di Camerino, Italy. Professor with contract of 'Economics and Management', Università di Ancona, Italy. Professor with contract in the Doctoral Programme of Economics and Management ("Firms, Organization and Competencies"), S. Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa.
Associations
Member of the "Industrial and Corporate Change Association" and the "Italian Academy of Management".
Research
His main research interests are in the economics and management of innovation, entrepreneurship and growth of emerging regions, and the effects of IT on firms' performance. He has participated in several research projects sponsored by the European Commission, the Alfred Sloan Foundation in the US, the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and the Ministry of Education and Scientific Research (MURST).
Abstract
This paper addresses innovative activities in the context of a large community of inventors who cooperate in a collective, distributed innovation environment. In particular, the paper focuses on the activity of open source software (OSS) projects and the characteristics of different categories of contributors (inventors). Several scholars look at OSS as a new innovation model which is based on the free disclosure of information by inventors. Most theoretical works on OSS try to understand the motivations for disclosure of the source code, the social norms and the patterns of collaboration among distributed developers, and the implications for dynamic efficiency and social welfare (e.g., Lerner and Tirole 2002b; von Hippel 2001; Dalle and Jullien 2001; Dalle and David 2003).
The objective of this paper is to analyze the performance of OSS projects on the following grounds. First, we measure the skill diversification of project participants. Second, we study the intended 'markets', i.e. the different potential users addressed by each project. Third, we explore the implications of skill diversification and the variety of intended markets on project performance, measured by survival and its level of activity over time. Finally, we analyze the contribution of external (non core developers) to the survival and activity of OSS projects. Our empirical analysis draws on a very large sample of OSS projects registered at the Sourceforge website. For the purposes of our analysis we use data on 65,535 projects and 544,669 contributors. For each project we have collected information about individual contributors such as skills, roles, and tasks assigned. Key variables at the project level are the number of project members or internal contributors (i.e., people who have subscribed to the project), the number of external contributors (a proxy for project openness), the overall skill combination of internal contributors (from technical skills to 'domain' and communication skills), the number of different intended 'markets' (e.g., developers and end users), and various measures of activity (e.g., number of file releases, bugs and patches closed over time).
We carry out an econometric analysis to test the hypothesis that skill diversification, intended market variety and project's openness (the number of external contributors) are important to projects' survival and activity.
