Management and the Future of Open Collaboration: Guest editorial

Open collaboration gained prominence as a practice with the advent of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities in the 1980s. Since then, technological advances have enabled individuals, firms and communities to implement applications relying on large-scale, open collaboration. Open collaboration research is a field of rapid growth in organizational theory and innovation. Initial work in this area has focussed on the management and governance of FOSS projects as well as on a wide range of user communities in fields as different as sports, scientific equipment users and manufacturers, library information systems, computer games, and medical equipment. Another research stream has focussed on open innovation from a corporate perspective, studying the ways in which traditional organizations can harness the power of communities to innovate, or on the creation of “boundary” or “hybrid” organizations that facilitate collaboration between open-source communities and firms. Yet another stream has focussed on open collaboration platforms, with particular focus on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, assessing participation processes and collaboration outcomes in this particular setting.