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Séminaire d’économie de Bordeaux

Jordana Viotto

(University of Edinburgh Business School)

« Online community engagement and new venture performance: Evidence from GitHub »

Abstract : The rise of online collaboration platforms reduced barriers to entry in entrepreneurship. In this paper, we argue that engagement with communities in online collaboration platforms also contributes to firms’ performance. First, the ability to reuse knowledge and elicit contributions from external audiences accelerates product development. Second, the engagement with online communities provides credible information about the firms’ technological and market potential at a stage where they lack track record, mitigating information asymmetries and supporting the acquisition of valuable connections with external partners. We test our hypotheses on firms that use GitHub, one of the largest digital platforms for collaboration in software development. We find that firms that reuse more code and elicit more collaboration reach public-facing milestones faster. We also find that the extent to which firms attract developers to collaborate on their source code and to use their source code as a benchmark is positively correlated with the likelihood of receiving investment from venture capitalists.

>> pour assister au séminaire via Zoom, contacter julie.vissaguet@u-bordeaux.fr