The Evolution of Innovation Costs and the Dynamic Governance Mechanism of Open-Source Innovation Organizations

Open-source innovation is leading to the emergence of significant innovative products and knowledge, the spillover of social public interests, and the emergence of multiple innovation organizations. Different from the self-governance of open-source activities in technical communities, open-source innovation organizations to a certain extent. achieve effective convergence of innovation results. However, innovation organizations also bring new requirements for the costs of innovation governance. As the innovation spillover and market value obtained by open-source innovation organizations become increasingly noticeable, the impact of national policy arrangements on open-source innovation activities and the innovation costs of open-source organizations is worth studying.

Based on the innovation cost problems of open-source innovation organizations, this article constructs a “behavior-rule-performance” framework to reveal the evolution of innovation costs and dynamic governance mechanisms in open-source innovation organizations. The study extracts three types of innovation costs in open-source innovation organizations: the incentive matching cost between cognition and behavior, the rule coordinating cost in the vertical integration structure, and the external transformation cost in innovation performance output. The researchers then compare the changes in innovation costs and internal dynamic governance processes of bazaar-type and hierarchical-type open-source innovation organizations under external policy shocks in China. Among these, bazaar-type and hierarchical-type open-source innovation organizations face all three types of innovation costs but from upward and downward directions, respectively. The evolution of innovation costs and the dynamic choice of governance mechanisms in organizational behavior development, rule implementation, and innovation output are the latest practical cases of social organizations responding to the will of the state.

Based on clarifying the governance focus of innovation costs in open source innovation organizations, highlighting the dynamic coordinating mode between top-down control and bottom-up incentive elements, proposing an effective transformation approach between the internal value and the external economy of the organization, and discovering the relationship between the direction of the evolution of the innovation costs and the choice of a dynamic governance mechanism inside the organization, this research provides a conceptual framework and empirical evidence from an organizational perspective for the study of innovation costs under open source conditions.