Master Thesis at the Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation [Topics focused on online
communities and/or open innovation]
The following thesis topics require experience or strong motivation to learn the latest quantitative
and/or qualitative research methods. Programming skill is a benefit. Research requires either statistical
analysis of archival data or online survey/questionnaire/interviews etc.
Some motivating questions:
1.
What is the role of online communities (e.g. the open software communities) in enabling and
structuring new forms of collaboration and innovation? (c.f. Faraj et al. (2011) Knowledge
Collaboration in Online Communities. Organization Science, 22(5): 1224-1239.)
2. How do technological advancement facilitate novel ways of organizing crowds and
innovation? (Von Krogh and Von Hippel (2006) The promise of research on open source
software. Management Science 52.7 975-983.)
3. What forms of institutional entrepreneurship have been facilitated in the digital age? (Garud et
al. (2002) Institutional entrepreneurship in the sponsorship of common technological
standards: The case of Sun Microsystems and Java. Academy of management journal, 45(1),
196-214.)
4. What are the implications of various online communities for firms value creation and
appropriation?
5. How do leaders emerge in online communities? (c.f. Faraj et al. (2015) Leading collaboration
in online communities. MIS Quarterly 39.2)
6. What is the role of open innovation in changing the boundaries of the firm? What are the
implications of changed boundaries? (c.f. Lakhani et al. (2012). Open innovation and
organizational boundaries: the impact of task decomposition and knowledge distribution on
the locus of innovation. Harvard Business School Technology & Operations Mgt. Unit
Working Paper, (12-57), 12-057.)
7. Are there new organizational forms that arise as firms engage in different forms of innovation
and organization? (Puranam et al. (2014) What's “new” about new forms of organizing?
Academy of Management Review 39.2 (2014): 162-180.)
8. What is the role of organizational boundaries in new forms of organizing? (Hwang et al.
(2015) Knowledge Sharing in Online Communities: Learning to Cross Geographic and
Hierarchical Boundaries. Organization Science )
9. How do insights from organization theory inform our understanding of open, participatory
forms of innovation? (von Krogh, & Haefliger (2010). Opening up design science: The
challenge of designing for reuse and joint development. The Journal of Strategic Information
Systems, 19(4), 232-241.)
10. What are the respective benefits and costs of engaging different crowds and organizational
forms when innovating?
11. How to govern online communities? (c.f., O'Mahony and Ferraro. (2007) The emergence of
governance in an open source community." Academy of Management Journal 50.5: 10791106.)
12. How do institutions enable or constrain more open forms of organization and innovation?
(Wallin & von Krogh (2010). Organizing for Open Innovation: Focus on the Integration of
Knowledge. Organizational Dynamics, 39(2), 145-154.)
Some example research contexts and data sources:
1. CrunchBase: CrunchBase provides a database of the startup ecosystem consisting of investors,
incubators and start-ups, which comprises around 500,000 data points profiling companies, people,
funds, funding and events. The company claims to have more than 50,000 active contributors. Within
this dataset of over 4,300 firms, 3,800 financial organizations, and 11,300 funding rounds (almost)
complete network covering several years can be constructed. [Complete data available at
http://data.crunchbase.com]
References:
a. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11187-011-9337-4
b. http://chbrown.github.io/kdd-2013-usb/workshops/MLG/doc/liang-mlg13.pdf
c. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jsc.893/full
2. Stack Exchange is a network of question and answer Websites
on topics of varied fields, each site covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are
subject to a reputation award process. The sites are modeled after Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for
computing programming questions that was the original site in this network. The reputation system
allows the sites to be self-moderating. [Complete data available at
https://archive.org/details/stackexchange]
References:
a. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2141550
b. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2480557
c. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2487107
d. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6676932
3. Github Data dump
GitHub is a Web-based Git repository hosting service. It offers all of the distributed revision
control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own
features. Unlike Git, which is strictly a command-line tool, GitHub provides a Web-based
graphical interface and desktop as well as mobile integration.
As of 2015, GitHub reports having over 11 million users and over 29.4 million repositories,
making it the largest host of source code in the world. [Complete data available at
https://www.githubarchive.org]
References:
a. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2145396
b. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441792
c. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6498480&tag=1
4. Hacker News
Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It
is run by Paul Graham’s investment fund and startup incubator, Y Combinator. In general, content that
can be submitted is defined as “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”.
Data dump: https://github.com/sytelus/HackerNewsData
References:
a. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441866
5. Yelp
Yelp is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. It
develops, hosts and markets Yelp.com and the Yelp mobile app, which publish crowd-sourced reviews
about local businesss. The company also trains small businesses in how to respond to reviews, hosts
social events for reviewers, and provides data about businesses, including health inspection scores.
Data set: https://www.yelp.com/dataset_challenge
References:
a. http://erhanerdogan.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1695/files/2011/10/12-016.pdf
b. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=2293164
c. http://www2.cs.uh.edu/~arjun/papers/ICWSM-Spam_final_camera-submit.pdf
6. Amazon Reviews
Amazon.com, Inc., often referred to as simply Amazon, is an American electronic commerce
and cloud computing company with headquarters in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest Internet-based
retailer in the United States.
Data set: https://snap.stanford.edu/data/web-Amazon.html
References:
a. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20721420?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
6. Bitcoin
Bitcoin is a form of digital currency, created and held electronically. No one controls it.
Bitcoins aren’t printed, like dollars or euros – they’re produced by people, and increasingly businesses,
running computers all around the world, using software that solves mathematical problems.
It’s the first example of a growing category of money known as cryptocurrency.
Data set: http://compbio.cs.uic.edu/data/bitcoin/
7. Open Education
All data from Stanford's courses on Coursera and NovoEd is available. For Coursera format
details see this page. For an explanation of data available from Stanford courses offered on our
OpenEdX platform, see Datastage.
8. IDEO, Innocentive, Wikipedia, AirBNB, Uber, or any online community: data can be crawled either
using API requests or writing spiders (for example using scrapy: http://scrapy.org )