Inventing the Internet
Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution
Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution
Prior Knowledge and the Discovery of Entrepreneurial Opportunities
Organization Science
Shifting Innovation to Users via Toolkits
Management Science
Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists
Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists
Brokerage, Boundary Spanning, and Leadership in Open Innovation Communities
Organization Science
Status, Quality, and Attention: What's in a (Missing) Name?
Management Science
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This paper contributes large-sample evidence to an emerging discussion on open innovation and firm strategy. We ask why a startup should participate in an open standards community. We propose four ways that participation might increase a startup's chances of a liquidity event: gaining endorsement of the startup's technology standard, openly developing the startup's technology within the community (but not necessarily gaining endorsement), simply attending physical meetings of the community, and having startup members elected to leadership positions. Examination of venture-funded startups in the networking/data communications industry sectors reveals that those startups that participate in an open standards community (the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)) have a greater likelihood of an initial public offering or acquisition. The strongest effects are due to attendance, and conditional on high levels of attendance, holding leadership positions within the IETF. Surprisingly, standards endorsement is insignificant when controlling for simple physical attendance. These results are robust to instrumental variable methods and alternative coding of variables. In two-stage models we also find that prominent venture capitalists might help their portfolio companies by steering them to effective technology strategies, in this case active participation in the IETF, and not simply by lending status.