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Joel West’s
Research on Openness Strategies
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A major emphasis of Joel’s research has
been how firms selectively use openness to gain competitive advantage — or
develop strategies that mitigate the effects of exogenous (or endogenous)
openness. This page
provides an annotated subset of his papers directly related to this topic.
Unofficial copies of the paper are available by clicking
on the title of the paper. Official copies (where copyright permits)
can be reached by clicking on the DOI, by
browsing the issue date or e-mailing the author.
These papers are only about firms deliberately using (or mitigating) the
effects of openness. See also Joel’s
full list of open
innovation, open
source and open standards research.
Publications
- Joel West and Michael Mace, “Browsing
as the killer app: Explaining the rapid
success of Apple’s iPhone,” Telecommunications
Policy, 34, 5-6 (June-July 2010): 270-286. DOI: 10.1016/j.telpol.2009.12.002
- Although the iPhone is a vertically integrated proprietary platform controlled
by Apple, it succeeds because of two forms of selective openness. First, Apple
provides unprecedented mobile access to the free Internet, supplanting the
operator-controlled walled gardens. Second, its iPhone App Store reduces the
entry barriers for
software developers
large and small through a common distribution mechanism, even if Apple tightly
controls access to this channel.
- Joel West and Siobhán O’Mahony, “The Role of Participation
Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities,”
Industry
& Innovation, 15, 2 (April 2008): 145-168. DOI: 10.1080/
13662710801970142
- A successor to our oft-quoted 2005
conference paper, this perhaps provides the first empirical evidence comparing
sponsored open source communities with the better
known
independent
communities.
It draws the contrast between two types of openness: transparency and accessibility.
It also identifies three dimensions of openness for open source communities:
production, governance and IP. (See my July 2008 blog
summary of the article). This is also the focus of my April 1, 2010 column in Business
Week entitled “Letting
Go Is Hard To Do.”
- Joel West, “The
Economic Realities of Open Standards: Black, White and Many Shades of
Gray,” in Shane Greenstein and Victor Stango, eds., Standards and Public
Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp.
87-122.
- This paper demonstrates the inaccuracy of the conventional bifurcation of
standards as “open” or “closed.”
Instead, it shows how openness is both a continuous attribute and a multi-dimensional
one. It also distinguishes between openness to different stakeholders (e.g.
complementors or rivals), and identifies openness as a challenger’s second
choice strategy if it fails to establish its own proprietary standard.
- Joel West, “Seeking Open Infrastructure: Contrasting Open
Standards, Open Source and Open Innovation,” First Monday, 12, 6 (June 2007).
- This paper contrasts three commonly discussed forms of openness: open standards,
open source and open innovation, identifying both the overlaps and the key
differences.
- Joel West, “Value
Capture and Value Networks in Open Source Vendor Strategies,”
Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawai‘i International Conference on
System Sciences, Waikoloa, Hawai‘i (Jan. 2007).
DOI: 10.1109/HICSS.2007.600
- This paper focuses on the tension between value creation and value capture in open source business models, and the strategies that firms use to gain advantage.
- Joel West and Scott Gallagher, “
Challenges of Open Innovation: The Paradox of Firm Investment in Open
Source Software,” R&D Management, 36, 3 (June 2006):
315-328. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9310.2006.00436.x
- The goals of open innovation are maximizing returns to internal
innovation, incorporating external innovation, and motivating a
supply of external innovations. From data on firm
open source strategies, it identifies four different strategies: pooled
R&D (consortium model), spinout (to communities),
selling complements or incentivizing donated complements.
- Joel West and Scott Gallagher, “Patterns of Open Innovation in Open Source Software,” in
Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke and Joel West,
eds., Open
Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006, pp. 82-106.
- In the discussion section, this chapter examines the relationship of “open
source” and “open innovation” — how
they are overlapping conceptual categories but not equivalent or interchangeable.
- Joel West, “Does Appropriability Enable or Retard Open
Innovation?” in Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke and Joel West,
eds., Open
Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006, pp. 109-133.
- This paper considers how open innovation often requires a proprietary IP strategy, such as the use of patents or other proprietary entry barriers to mitigate against the risks of openness.
- Joel West, “The
fall of a Silicon Valley icon: Was Apple really Betamax redux?”;
in Richard A. Bettis, ed., Strategy in Transition, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005,
pp. 274-301.
- Pundits often claim Apple’s troubles of the 1990s were due to its proprietary
platform strategy, specifically its failure to allow cloning or otherwise license
its
technology. Instead, the paper points to a simple explanation: the company’s
ongoing problems with execution in areas such as R&D and supply chain management,
and how its fiscal turnaround in 1998-2000 was entirely attributable to correcting
these problems, while its platform strategy became more closed during this
period.
- Joel West, “How Open is Open
Enough? Melding Proprietary and Open Source Platform
Strategies,”
Research Policy 32, 7 (July 2003): 1259-1285. DOI: 10.1016/S0048-
7333(03)00052-0
- Four ideas from this paper are often cited: 1) That
firms selectively use openness to gain advantage; 2) The use of openness as
a strategy
to win
adoption;
3)
Fine-tuning openness to be just “open enough” to not give up proprietary
advantage, by “opening parts” or being “partly open”;
4) A gradation of openness in platform strategies, with open source platforms
(like Linux) being the most open.
- Joel West and Jason Dedrick, “Open
Source Standardization: The Rise of Linux in the Network Era,”
Knowledge, Technology & Policy, 14, 2 (Summer 2001): 88-112.
- This paper is one of the first published academic papers about why firms would use open source as a competitive strategy.
- Joel West and Jason Dedrick, “Innovation and Control in Standards
Architectures: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s PC-98,” Information Systems Research, 11, 2 (June 2000): 197-216.
- This paper talks about how IBM created DOS/V, a software-defined open PC
standards layer, which reduced costs and increased competition in the Japanese
PC market. Together, IBM and other DOS/V PC makers displaced the long-time
market leader, NEC’s PC-98, which eventually switched to DOS/V. The paper
also is an early progenitor of research on platforms, which it refers to as “standards
architectures.”
Blog Postings
Not surprisingly, a frequent topic in my blogs is about the selective use of openness. In particular, see posts from the Open IT Strategies blog on:
and of course my academic-oriented Open Innovation blog.
Last Updated August 13, 2010
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