On the Synergy of Conflict and Collective Creativity in Open Innovation Socio-technical Ecologies

Sustaining open innovation requires better understanding how collaborative efforts of contributors yield collective creativity. One of the significant problems in understanding emergence of collective creativity involves how collectives govern and coordinate the actions of individuals to maximize innovation output. Yet, relatively little is known about desirable organizing processes in open innovation communities. To this end, we examine the impact of governance mechanisms and conflict management styles on collective creativity in open source socio-ecologies. Systems model of creativity and proxy metrics for measuring potential for collective creativity are utilized to conduct a simulation study of open source software socio-ecologies. Findings suggest that decentralized coordination schemes such as emergent selection that are observed in utility communities along with moderate degrees of assertiveness and cooperation for conflict management result in higher incidence of innovation.