Matthijs den Besten

Montpellier Business School

We study start-up accelerators, a new type of entrepreneurial support organization characterized by its coaching of regular cohorts of startup founders, that developed rapidly after pioneer accelerator Y-Combinator, founded in 2005, had ‘accelerated’ success stories Dropbox and AirBnB among others. We suggest that accelerators can be analysed as pl...

The five papers in this special section focus on collaboration and innovation dynamics in software ecosystems. Over the past years, there has been an exponential growth in the number of articles mentioning “ecosystem” as their topic, and among them, ecosystems in the context of information and communication technologies have received particular att...

In a widely used definition, a software ecosystem is a 'collection of software projects which are developed and evolve together in the same environment'. The objective of this paper is to explore how software ecosystems foster collaboration among their key players to achieve innovation within individual software projects. Thus, in this paper, we me...

Human capital has been amply discussed in the literature as a crucial factor for the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). However, the factors mediating the relationship between human capital and small business growth are rarely addressed. Based on the logics of the interlock between abilities, intent and effort, and goals; mediatio...

This article adopts a feminist perspective to examine masculine work culture in the development of free/libre open source software. The authors draw on a case study of the ‘Heidi bug’ discovered during the development of the Mozilla Firefox web browser to examine how ‘gendered talk’ was (en)‐acted to facilitate ‘bricolage’ in an online work environ...

This article adopts a feminist perspective to examine masculine work culture in the development of free/libre open source software. The authors draw on a case study of 'the Heidi Bug' discovered during the development of the Mozilla Firefox web browser to examine how 'gendered talk' was (en)-acted to facilitate 'bricolage' in an online work environ...

We investigate the influence of networking on micro and small enterprises (MSEs) innovation and growth. We claim that people whom the entrepreneur approaches for advice as well as the companies with which initial relationships are forged leave an imprint that is reflected in MSEs tendency to upgrade—that is, innovate and grow. Our analysis of a sam...

We explore how microwork platforms manage difficult tasks in paid crowdsourcing environments. We argue that as human computation becomes more prevalent, notably in the context of big data ecosystems, microwork platforms might have to evolve and to take a more managerial stance in order to provide the right incentives to online workers to handle dif...

While the role of small businesses in innovation is well described, little attention is given to freelancers (business owners whose businesses are without personnel and who have no desire to grow their business). We used a sample of 32,595 French freelancers who started in 2002 to explore to what degree they are operating in innovative vs. non-inno...

Research in the separate areas of innovation and growth has considerably intensified in recent years. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to the entrepreneurs’ personal characteristics that might explain the growth of micro and small enterprises (MSEs) through innovation. This study examines the key entrepreneurs’ personal characteris...

In this article, we focus on the need for “human computing” in data-rich ecosystems, notably as a consequence of data variety and typically for name disambiguation, and explore ways to manage it via online platforms for paid crowdsourcing. Based on several studies of Amazon Mechanical Turk, a well-established platform for matching data treatment ta...

According to the so-called "mirroring hypothesis", the structure of an organization tends to replicate the technical dependencies among the different components in the product (or service) that the organization is developing. An explanation for this phenomenon is that socio-technical alignment, which can be measured by the congruence of technical d...

Les systèmes d’information (S.I.) sont souvent rattachés aux innovations technologiques, à ce titre les medias présentent régulièrement les dernières innovations liées aux technologies de l'information et de la communication (TIC). Pourtant, les S.I. vont bien plus loin que cette simple vision. Si effectivement l'informatique, apparue dans les anné...

Crowdsourcing is a process for outsourcing micro-tasks to a distributed group of anonymous people, as in Amazon Mechanical Turk. The purpose of this paper is to present an exploration of the extant literature on crowdsourcing to identify best practices and describe the results of the implementation of a prototype that uses crowdsourcing to help wit...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore consequences of the use of social media for idea generation. Design/methodology/approach The paper analyzes over 600 ideas submitted to a Slate ‐Twitter contest to find the best short characterization of the American Declaration of Independence. These findings are then compared with those of Kornish...

Products and services offered by a firm are often used in unexpected ways. For the firm this poses a dilemma: it does not want to stifle creativity, but it does not want to loose control either. Software, being easy to copy, is even harder to control. The cases of Wifi-Sync for iPhone and Freeplayer mods for Freebox show that it can be beneficial t...

Acid3 is the third of three benchmark tests that have been devised to challenge browsers to comply with Internet standards [6]. While Firefox developers at Mozilla had fully embraced the predecessor to Acid3, Acid2, they showed themselves much more reticent this time around. As the quote above indicates they had come to feel that Acid3 would divert...

In 2010, Slate organized a contest on Twitter for which it invited people to summarize the Declaration of Independence. This paper describes and analyzes the submissions made to this contest in order to illustrate the trade-offs and tensions of organizational closure versus open networks, group versus individual and homogeneity versus diversity tha...

Wikipedia, the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”, has evolved substantially over the years according to the editors' needs for more coordination and better quality management. In particular, metadata in the form of “templates” added to pages have come to play a critical role, working in a sense like stigmergic “stigmata” or “signals” which e...

In this paper, we present preliminary evidence suggesting that the voting mechanism implemented by the open-source Firefox community is a means to provide a supplementary voice to mainstream users. This evidence is drawn from a sample of bug-reports and from information on voters both found within the bug-tracking system (Bugzilla) for Firefox. Alt...

Experts examine ways in which the use of increasingly powerful and versatile digital information and communication technologies are transforming research activities across all disciplines. Advances in information and communication technology are transforming the way scholarly research is conducted across all disciplines. The use of increasingly pow...

Experts examine ways in which the use of increasingly powerful and versatile digital information and communication technologies are transforming research activities across all disciplines. Advances in information and communication technology are transforming the way scholarly research is conducted across all disciplines. The use of increasingly pow...

It is commonly accepted that data is not the same as information, let alone knowledge. For instance, the numbering and photographing of the fins of thousands of dolphins would certainly be data, but doubtfully information of knowledge; a city's large phone directory is undoubtedly information, but hardly knowledge - and certainly not permanent or r...

In this chapter, we investigate the use of web-based data for mapping the collaboration dynamics of e-research at the project level. We focus on the web presences of projects that were part of the UK e-Science and e-Social Science programmes, cyberinfrastucture-like efforts that aimed to foster the development of collaboration infrastructure, initi...

Anyone enquiring about "e-science" is bound to be led to a quotation from John Taylor's (2001) introductory description of this movement's essence as being "about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it". Although much that has been written about e-science is occupied with the engin...

Though largely spontaneous and loosely regulated, the process of peer production within online communities is also supplemented by additional coordination mechanisms. In this respect, we study an emergent organizational practice of the Wikipedia community, the use of template messages, which seems to act as effective and parsimonious coordination d...

In this paper, we present preliminary evidence suggesting that the voting mechanism implemented by the open-source Firefox community is a means to provide a supplementary voice to mainstream users. This evidence is drawn from a sample of bug-reports and from information on voters both found within the bug-tracking system (Bugzilla) for Firefox. Alt...

In the paper we investigate an organizational practice meant to increase the quality of commons-based peer production: the use of template messages in wiki-collections to highlight editorial bugs and call for intervention. In the context of SimpleWiki, an online encyclopedia of the Wikipedia family, we focus on {complex}, a template which is used t...

Open innovation encompasses two seemingly orthogonal approaches that firms can adopt to engage with their surroundings. On the one hand, they can focus on long-term loyalty and try to foster a community. On the other hand, they can focus on short-term benefits and source from the crowd. In some cases the long-term objective can be reached by pursui...

According to the now widely accepted onion-model of the organization of open source software development, an open source project typically relies on a core of developers that is assisted by a larger periphery of users. But what does the role of the periphery consist of? Raymond's Linus's Law which states that given enough eyeballs all bugs are shal...

Observers of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, have long been mesmerized by issues like the quality and quantity of its outputs and the fights and feuds among its contributors. Much less attention has been given to the design of the Wikipedia environment and how it has been shaped in support of its goals. The substrate of this...

According to the now widely accepted onion-model of the organization of open source software development, an open source project typically relies on a core of developers that is assisted by a larger periphery of users. But what does the role of the periphery consist of? Raymond's Linus's Law which states that given enough eyeballs all bugs are shal...

It is often said that the life sciences are transforming into an information science. As laboratory experiments are starting to yield ever increasing amounts of data and the capacity to deal with those data is catching up, an increasing share of scientific activity is seen to be taking place outside the laboratories, sifting through the data and mo...

Purpose This paper seeks to discuss the question of “openness” in e‐Science. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on 12 in‐depth interviews with principal investigators, project managers and developers involved in UK e‐Science projects, together with supporting documentary evidence from project web sites. The approach was to explore the...

Questions concerning the actual extent of 'openness' of research processes identified with contemporary e-science should address at least two main sets of issues pertaining to the conduct of 'open science.' The first set concerns the terms on which individuals may enter and leave research projects. Who is permitted to join the collaboration? Are al...

In the paper we investigate an organizational practice meant to increase the quality of commons-based peer production: the use of template messages in wiki collections to highlight editorial bugs and call for intervention. In the context of SimpleWiki, an online encyclopedia of the Wikipedia family, we focus on {complex}, a template which is used t...

In this paper we investigate how in commons based peer production a large community of contributors coordinates its efforts towards the production of high quality open content. We carry out our empirical analysis at the level of articles and focus on the dynamics surrounding their production. That is, we focus on the continuous process of revision...

Experts examine ways in which the use of increasingly powerful and versatile digital information and communication technologies are transforming research activities across all disciplines. Advances in information and communication technology are transforming the way scholarly research is conducted across all disciplines. The use of increasingly pow...

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia put together by volunteers, is a prime example of a distributed problem-solving network with a global array of contributors creating a resource that has been compared to leading encyclopedia. The study focused on efforts to maintain the quality of Wikipedia entries and in particular of the use of tagging to...

The challenges of commons based peer production are usually associated with the development of complex software projects such as Linux and Apache. But the case of open content production should not be treated as a trivial one. For instance, while the task of maintaining a collection of encyclopedic articles might seem negligible compared to the one...

Firefox, a browser targeted at mainstream users, has been one of the big successes of open source development in recent years. That Firefox succeeded where earlier attempts failed is undoubtedly due to the particular choices that were made in the process of development. In this paper, we look at this process in more detail. Mining bug reports and f...

In an undertaking such as the U.S. Cyberinfrastructure Initiative, or the UK e-science program, which span many years and comprise a great many projects funded by multiple agencies, it can be very difficult to keep tabs on what everyone is doing. But, it is not impossible. In this paper, we propose the construction of ontologies as a means of monit...

Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia, is a phenomenal success. It is tempting to think that Wikipedia owes its success to the special and innovative way in which it gathers and integrates content. However, it might just as well be that the contrary is the case: that, through a process of trial and error, Wikipedia has strayed from its idealistic ori...

In this paper, we inquire about some of the ways in which the community around Simple Wikipedia—an offspring of Wikipedia, the notorious free online encyclopedia—manages the online collaborative production of reliable knowledge. We focus on how it keeps its collection of articles “simple” and easy to read. We find that the labeling of pages as “uns...

This paper analyzes a Wiki which has been developed for annotating the novel Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon in terms of how it Junctions as a tool for online research collaboration. The annotation of this long and complex work of fiction has taken place in a very short time, with many contributors and great depth of coverage. We compare this Wik...

This issue of Information Economics and Policy focuses on a fundamental shift in the software industry: the organisation of software production with the aim of disclosure rather than appropriation. Open source software, as it is now most frequently referred to in the academic literature, is simultaneously a means of production, social organisation,...

The article investigates the allocation of collaborative efforts among core developers (maintainers) of open-source software by analyzing on-line development traces (logs) for a set of 10 large projects. Specifically, we investigate whether the division of labor within open-source projects is influenced by characteristics of software code. We sugge...

The case study of the Mozilla project is focused on the organization of quality control and quality assurance in a distributed innovation environment, and focuses on the coordination of the detection and correction of operating defects ('bugs') in Mozilla's Firefox web-browser. Analyzing two samples of bugs drawn from the 40,000 or so that have res...

The paper investigates the processes by which bugs are .xed in open-source software projects. Focusing on Mozilla and combining data from both its bug tracker (Bugzilla) and from its CVS, we suggest that: a) Some bugs resist beyond the .rst patch applied to the main branch of the source code in relation to them, which we denote as superbugs; b) The...

In a recent working paper, Gavetti and Rivkin tell the history of the search engine turned Internet portal Lycos and discuss the management decisions and market developments that turned Lycos from a Carnegie Mellon spin-off into the leading Web media company that would eventually be bought by the Spanish Internet service provider Terra. Gavetti and...

This paper examines various aspects of "openness" in research, and seeks to gauge the degree to which escience is congruent with "open science." Norms and practices of openness, arguably, have been vital for the work of modern scientific communities, but concerns about the growth of stronger technical and institutional restraints on access to resea...

We suggest that signal processing techniques can be used to mine on-line repositories associated with open-source software, and specially CVS archives. By analyzing the frequencies of CVS signals, we present preliminary evidence of daily-commit effects, and also, for some developers at least, of week-end effects.

The paper investigates collaborative work among maintainers of open source software by analyzing the logs of a set of 10 large projects. We inquire whether teamwork can be influenced by several characteristics of code. Preliminary results suggest that collaboration among maintainers in most large open-source projects seems to be positively influenc...

The NewTies project is implementing a simulation in which societies of agents are expected to de-velop autonomously as a result of individual, population and social learning. These societies are expected to be able to solve environmental challenges by acting collectively. The challenges are in-tended to be analogous to those faced by early, simple,...

12-15 April, Environment design for emerging artificial societies

The thesis studies the emergence of bioinformatics as a new scientific discipline. More specifically, it studies the rise in bioinformatics degree programs in recent years. I argue that the massive effort to sequence all DNA of human beings, the Human Genome Project (HGP) is the main culprit. The HGP needed bioinformatics to provide to tools to obt...

this paper we focus on the application of a particular VNS technique called variable neighborhood descent (VND) to scheduling problems in which a solution can be represented as a single permutation of all jobs. This class of scheduling problems includes single machine problems as well as a variety of multiple machine problems. In this abstract, we...

In this article we investigate the application of iterated local search (ILS) to the single machine total weighted tardiness problem.

In this article we investigate the application of iterated local search (ILS) to the single machine total weighted tardiness problem. Our research is inspired by the recently proposed iterated dynasearch approach, which was shown to be a very effective ILS algorithm for this problem. In this paper we systematically configure an ILS algorithms by op...

this paper we focus on the application of a particular VNS technique called variable neighborhood descent [3] to scheduling problems in which a solution can be represented as one permutation of all jobs. This class of scheduling problems includes single machine problems as well as a variety of multiple machine problems. In this abstract, we present...

In this extended abstract we present an algorithm based on the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) metaheuristic for the single machine total weighted tardiness problem, a well known NP--hard scheduling problem. Our ACO algorithm is currently among the best algorithms known for this problem type. In particular, we will discuss three elements that enable...

In this article we present an application of the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) metaheuristic to the single machine total weighted tardiness problem. First, we briefly discuss the constructive phase of ACO in which a colony of artificial ants generates a set of feasible solutions. Then, we introduce some simple but very effective local search. Last,...

. In this article we investigate the application of iterated local search (ILS) to the single machine total weighted tardiness problem. Our research is inspired by the recently proposed iterated dynasearch approach, which was shown to be a very effective ILS algorithm for this problem. In this paper we systematically configure an ILS algorithms by...

In this article we investigate the application of iterated local search (ILS) to the single machine total weighted tardiness problem. Our research is inspired by the recently proposed iterated dynasearch approach, which was shown to be a very effective ILS algorithm for this problem. In this paper we systematically configure an ILS algorithms by op...

We argue that templates in Wikipedia represent a variety of meta-data which are used as a means to coordinate collaborative work. We suggest that such "management through meta-data" might be an important coordination mechanism for online communities.

This paper will discuss the e-Research strategies in Germany, the UK and elsewhere with a view to identifying potential lessons that can be learned. The UK e-Science initiative has been ongoing for more than five years, as has the cyberinfrastructure initiative in the US. The German D-Grid and other e-Research initiatives are much more recent. Gene...

On the basis of a study of collaborative work on Simple Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia, we argue that there is an important role for CSCW to participate in the design of protocols that would render the construction of common information spaces on the Web more manageable.

According to the largely accepted "onion-model" of the organization of open source software development, an open source project relies on a core of developers assisted by a larger periphery of users. Following this characterization of the division of labor between a core and a periphery, and with the help of text-mining methods, we study the treatm...