Week5_Grewal et al.(2006)_Yaeeun Kim

This article examined the effects of network embeddedness on the success of open source projects. The authors assume heterogeneity and investigated how these structure differ across project and managers. They showed that there is significant effect of network embeddedness on technical and commercial success. By using latent class regression analysis, they showed that different aspects of network embeddedness have powerful but subtle effects on project success. In this case, the valence of word-of-mouth (WOM) decides the success (the number of page view or downloads).

According to the social contagion, positive WOM within the network of users would result in more users visiting the project websites (externality), and leads to commercial success. However, they assume that negative WOM would make a decrease in outcome (or the number of downloads).

The result shows that project network embeddedness positively influences project technical success, while the effect of project manager network embeddedness is more complex and different for older projects when compared with younger project. They used centrality for method: degree centrality is the number of projects in which the manager participates (structural embeddedness), betweenness centrality is the number of paths between other nodes on which the manager lies (junctional embeddedness), and eigenvector centrality is the manager participates in important projects (positional embeddedness).

In summary, the article shows that the effect of project network embeddedness positively influenced project technical success. However, the effect of project manager network embeddedness varies in the year of project. As a result, the network embeddedness was more influential to technical success, which were attractive to developers visually, but the influence was less powerful in commercial success, which were less visible to users.