Governing open spaces: rules, goals, and metrics in innovation communities
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Abstract
Digitization has fueled the growth of innovation communities capable of producing significant economic and social value. At the same time, the rate and direction of innovation in these settings typically unfold beyond the control of managers and policymakers who aim to shape it. Research on the emergence and effects of governance in community forms can clarify how innovation happens in these open spaces. In this dissertation, I study how governance mechanisms such as rules, goals, and metrics shape innovation in open communities and ecosystems. In the first chapter, I explore how innovation communities come to introduce policies encouraging inclusivity and the circumstances under which they are fruitful. Specifically, I examine open source software (OSS) communities that adopt codes of conduct to assess the effects of these policies on both technical (productivity) and social (inclusivity) outcomes. This research may guide firms involved in capturing value from OSS or otherwise faced with coordinating volunteer contributors. In the second chapter, I study the relationship between goal multiplicity and innovation in user communities. There, I observe gaming communities that pursue multiple performance goals to judge whether and how these goals interact and support the discovery of novel in-game techniques. This research stands to benefit firms leveraging user communities and open crowds as innovation partners. In the third chapter, I examine how the introduction and removal of leaderboard metrics differentially shape participant behavior in an open innovation ecosystem. Using data from the Hugging Face platform, I investigate how designers of open large language models (LLMs) respond differently to metric changes by actor type—users, firms, communities, and non-profits—and what this implies for the collective technological trajectory. This research may inform policymakers interested in shaping nascent technologies as well as firms involved in open innovation.
Description
2026