Leading open innovation: The role of strategic entrepreneurial leadership in orchestration of value creation and capture in GitHub open source communities

This study investigates the role of entrepreneurial leadership in the orchestration of resource domains towards effective value creation and capture in open innovation (OI). To do so, it proposes a threefold framework that, first it explores the role of OI leaders in cultivating an environment that supports diverse motivational drivers of network members in the input domain. Second, it explains the impact of establishing facets of power by emergent OI leaders on setting the direction of a dominant flow of innovation in the institutional domain. Third, it postulates the impact of entrepreneurial contributions of OI leaders - opportunity-seeking and advantage-seeking activities - in aligning knowledge-asset creation and monetization strategies with the dominant demands and dynamics in the market domain. The proposed model is discussed by drawing on instances from open source communities hosted on GitHub. This study makes contributions to literature on open innovation and entrepreneurial leadership. By highlighting the importance of entrepreneurial contributions of OI leaders, it expands the research on open innovation beyond the traditional focus on leaders' social and technical contributions. By examining the construct of entrepreneurial leadership from the OI perspective, this study offers insights into the complexities of developing and monetizing innovation in novel collaborative environments, which deviates from the organizational proprietary approach dominant in this literature.