How founders' social capital affects the success of open-source projects: A resource-based view of project teams

Volunteers under the open-source paradigm organize themselves and coordinate their efforts through the Internet to develop new products and services. Researchers have recognized open-source project founders' social capital as an important factor to determine the performance of innovations in the open-source software (OSS) context. This study extends previous research by considering the founders' social capital as a means to create strategic resources of project teams. We use data collected from an OSS development community to identify the role of founders' social capital in team resource acquisition and utilization. We also clarify its inconsistent effects on innovation performance. From a resource-based view, we find that team size, as a manifestation of human resources, and team brokerage, as a manifestation of organizational resources, are determined by the social capital of project founders, and, in turn, have effects on innovation performance. However, team size and team brokerage contribute differently to innovation performance. The findings enrich our understanding of the impact of founders' social capital in OSS communities and provide OSS project leaders and firm managers with guidelines on boosting their chances for successful projects.