PhD Thesis Defence, Poonacha Medappa, ISOM

Congratulations to Dr Poonacha Medappa, Information System and Operations Management specialization, who successfully defended his thesis at HEC Paris, on August 23, 2019. Poonacha will join the Tilburg School of Economics and Management (TiSEM), Tilburg University (The Netherlands) as Assistant Professor.
"One of the best Thesis on the subject that I have ever read", Professor Carol Ou, Tilburg University, member of the Jury.

Thesis Topic: Essays on Value Creation in the Open Source Phenomenon: Understanding the Influence of Work Structures, Team Composition, and Community Ideologies

Supervisor: Professor Srivastava Shirish, HEC Paris

Abstract: This dissertation comprising three essays explores the value creation mechanisms associated with the work structures, team composition, and community ideologies of open source software projects. The first essay examines the unique nature of open source work which is dominated by the sequential layering of individual tasks. This essay theorizes the motivational mechanisms associated with the work structures of open source projects and examines their influence on project success. While the first essay establishes the importance of task-work organization in open source projects, the second essay expands the inquiry into the role of team composition in the project’s success. Building on the theories of coordination and network governance, this essay studies the influence of source code access restrictions imposed on team members in mitigating coordination challenges. The third essay pursues an overarching view of the open source community by examining the ideological foundations of the community and studies its influence on project success. The essay scrutinizes two ideological shifts seen in the open source community that have altered the beliefs of ‘openness’ and ‘prevention of commercial appropriation’, on which the open source phenomenon was founded.

Thank you to the jury and all fellow students who joined the defence.