Authorising Employees to Collaborate with Communities During Working Hours: When is it Valuable for Firms?

This paper advances our comprehension of how firms organise to in-source technical knowledge from communities of users and developers. Specifically, the paper focuses on software firms doing business with the Open Source Software (OSS) community (OSS firms). It explores the antecedents of the adoption by OSS firms of a quite popular organisational practice: authorising firm programmers to contribute autonomously during their working hours to OSS projects to which their employers do not contribute on their own behalf. We argue that this practice serves the purpose of scouting the OSS community for new knowledge by leveraging the individual-level absorptive abilities of programmers. Accordingly, we expect the likelihood of its adoption is higher for the OSS firms that: i) must rely on the individual-level abilities of their programmers to acquire and assimilate new knowledge from the OSS community as they have smaller firm-level potential absorptive capacity; ii) are able to transform and exploit effectively the new knowledge in-sourced by their programmers as they have greater firm-level realised absorptive capacity. The econometric results based on data from 293 European OSS firms provide support to our hypotheses.