Abstract: With the development of digital technology, open-source communities that aggregate high-quality resources continue to emerge, lowering the barriers to entrepreneurship for new start-ups. Digital startups regard them as an important source of innovation elements. Both sides realize openness and sharing through an open-source collaboration (OSC) behavior. However, enterprises not only want to use knowledge flow to achieve collaboration across organizational boundaries, but also face the inevitable risk of technology leakage. Therefore, openness will bring not only shared benefits, but also an infringement risk going along with them. Digital entrepreneurship is faced with the paradox of openness, a dilemma in the choice between value creation and value protection.
To address this dilemma in the entrepreneurial process, this paper analyzes the open-source collaboration behavior and its behavioral consequences from an outside-in inbound OSC and an inside-out outbound OSC two-way process. A duopoly differential game model is constructed based on the open-source community and entrepreneurial enterprises, in which the open-source community has two strategy choices: “sharing” and “not sharing”. Enterprises allow the inbound OSC to be regarded as an opening strategy and outbound OSC as an open-source strategy. In addition, the stochastic differential game model is further constructed by incorporating different external factors and the differentiated strategy choices of digital entrepreneurship at different stages are analyzed according to the enterprise life cycle theory. Finally, the equilibrium strategy obtained is verified by numerical simulation to further verify the reliability of the conclusions of this paper.
The results of differential game show that when the total revenue distribution ratio of the open-source community is greater than one-third, the cooperative game can make both parties achieve Pareto optimality, the Stackelberg master-slave game is second and the Nash non-cooperative game has the lowest return. At the same time, the results of stochastic differential game show that when digital startups are in the conceptual and commercialization stages, the protection is crucial, the strategy of strong opening and weak open source should be adopted and the protection of enterprise value should be paid more attention while using external knowledge. In the growth stage, facing the core task of expanding market share, enterprises have the capability for value protection. Enterprises should adopt a strong open-source strategy of inbound OSC and outbound OSC in parallel, so as to enhance the value creation ability of new products. As digital entrepreneurship makes full use of OSC for cost control and data accumulation, this study can provide a reference for decision-making on the optimal strategy in different stages.
In this paper, the development stage of digital startups is listed as the main interference factor in the stochastic differential game. But, in the actual process, the random interference is complex and difficult to measure; the influencing factors that are difficult to observe also include the business model of venture capital institutions, the attitude toward open-source risks and the founders’ ability to control open-source strategies, etc. Case studies or survey interviews are used to supplement the situational variables studied in this paper. What’s more, this paper mainly analyzes two large open-source communities based on the foreign GitHub platform and the domestic Open-Source China. The future work can extend the selection strategies of open-source communities for startups and further analyze OSC activities of startups on different platforms, which in turn can provide decision-making reference for the top-level design of open-source community platforms.

Key words: digital entrepreneurship, digital technology open source community, open paradox, differential game, OSC

摘要： 随着数字技术的发展,聚合优质资源的开源社区不断涌现,数字创业将其作为创新要素的重要来源,双方通过开源协作(OSC)行为实现开放与共享,但开放带来的共享收益与相伴而生的侵权风险使得数字创业面临开放性悖论。针对创业过程中的这一困境,从由外向内的入站OSC和由内向外的出站OSC双向过程分析开源协作行为及其带来的行为结果。本文在开源社区与创业企业的双寡头微分博弈模型基础上纳入外部情境因素,构建了随机微分博弈模型,并通过实例数值仿真验证均衡策略。随机微分博弈结果表明,数字创业企业处于概念阶段和商业化阶段时,应采取强开放弱开源策略,在利用外部知识的同时更需注重企业价值保护;处于成长阶段时,应采取入站OSC与出站OSC并行的强开放强开源策略,进而提升新产品价值创造能力。本研究能为创业企业在不同阶段的最优策略提供决策参考。

关键词: 数字创业, 开源社区, 开放悖论, 微分博弈, 开源协作