Abstract
While private-collective communities, such as open source software communities engaging directly with firms, are argued to provide the “best of both worlds” for knowledge creation, little is known about how entrepreneurs, one of the driving forces of value creation in society, contribute to these communities. We conducted a multi-method exploratory case study using data from a four-year period of the OpenSimulator project to investigate the following question: How do entrepreneurs contribute to the creation and accumulation of social capital in an open source community? Our research reveals that entrepreneurs connect themselves to diverse sets of ties, position themselves as bridges between disparate network groups, and are centrally located within the network across both time periods, making them an integral part of the success of the community. We also show that the community supports the entrepreneurs by providing them with the necessary resources and connections to flourish their businesses. Our analysis further shows that while entrepreneurs are actively engaged in social capital building activities, this requires them to develop and freely reveal their intellectual property to the community for others to use. We therefore propose the idea of “open entrepreneurship” to describe the process in which entrepreneurs share their way to success by leveraging their social capital in an open source community to identify, co-create, and realize opportunities through shared resources and expertise.