Exploring the impact of organizational and working models, incentives and collaboration strategies on innovation development in online communities of practices

The aim of the research is to evaluate the actual phenomena of online communities for software development and their potential expansion as intermediary platform in open innovation processes. Consequently, the present paper propose an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of the virtual communities of practice that drive the innovative development of web applications. The driving research questions are: Which are the preeminent characteristics of practice communities that can favor the process of creation and realization of a web application? Do these characteristics differ in the different phases of web-application building project (ideation, design, realization and verify)? We adopted a multiple case study research design. After a selection of communities of practice related to the development of a web application, we obtained a sample of 46 communities of practice. We classified them basing on the different processes that support the different phases of the innovation process in software development analyzing six important characteristics for each one. The results of the empirical analysis shows that best practices are: In reference to members' involvement (strategies to attract and to permit to collaborate), the use of open source projects or challenges as organizational and working models to attract and to motivate community's members and strategies like royalties concession, direct charging of participation task from the community and fixed project deadline as form of incentives to be used; In reference to the role of the community and of community members in software development, the support from other developers, involvement of professional developer and direct contact as form of strategies of collaboration.