Open Source Software and Global Entrepreneurship

Citation: Nataliya Langburd Wright, Frank Nagle, Shane Greenstein Open Source Software and Global Entrepreneurship.
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Open Source Software and Global Entrepreneurship
Wikidata (metadata): Q104643353
Download: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/20-139 46ceae60-a633-4451-9d9d-b2464a93f3c8.pdf
Tagged: github (RSS)

Summary

Pioneers a systematic approach to analyzing global participation in open source (using data from GitHub) and global entrepreneurship (using company data from Crunchbase and financing data from Preqin). Companies in Crunchbase are categorized as broad (IT) or narrow (OSS), and their mission is categorized from the same source as global or not. Control variables include country size, human capital index, internet users per capita, and a measure of business formation costs.

Data sample consists of 3,383 observations, encompassing a panel of 199 countries from 2000 to 2016. High income countries comprise a significant share but do not dominate the dataset. All control variables were available for 183 countries, leaving 2,656 observations.

3 supply side interaction instruments would reduce cost of open source participation: high human capital, digital skills, and internet users. Create a 4th instrument based on GitHub contributions from a country's 3 largest trading partners. 2 demand side instruments increasing pull of open source include OSS policies in 64 countries, and a combination of OSS policies and weak economic growth.

Analysis and simulation finds large impacts of OSS participation on various measures of entrepreneurship: "1 percent increase in GitHub commits(code contributions) from people residing in a given country generates a 0.1-0.5 percent increase in the number of technology ventures founded within that country, a 0.6percent increase in the number of new financing deals, a 0.97 percent increase in financing value, a 0.3 percent increase in the number of technology acquisitions, and a 0.1-0.5 percent increase in the number of global and mission-oriented ventures."

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

Careful study of micro-mechanisms may reveal why a large OSS community does or does not stimulate growth in different countries. For example, does repression impact?