April 2011

From the Editor-in-Chief

The editorial theme for this issue of the OSBR is Collectives. We have invited authors from Carleton University and the Government of Canada’s Policy Research Initiative to contribute to this issue. I am pleased to welcome our Guest Editor Dr. Tony Bailetti, the Director of Carleton University’s Technology Innovation Management program.

We encourage readers to share articles of interest with their colleagues, and to provide their comments either online or directly to the authors.

The editorial theme for the upcoming May issue is Women Entrepreneurs and the deadline for submissions is April 15th. For subsequent issues, we welcome general submissions on the topic of open source business or the growth of early-stage technology companies. Please contact me if you are interested in submitting an article.

Chris McPhee

Editor-in-Chief


From the Guest Editor

The articles in this issue of the OSBR focus on collectives that harness diversity to produce significant system-level outcomes. These collectives support members that belong to different groups and carry out activities in three different horizons: today's business (Horizon 1), the next generation of emerging businesses (Horizon 2), and the longer-term options out of which the next generation of businesses will arise (Horizon 3).

In the first article, James Makienko and Antonio Misaka provide an update on the Keystone Off-The-Shelf (KOTS) project. KOTS integrates open source applications with proprietary products and services of innovative companies into a platform designed to support collectives that harness diversity to create jobs and enable small innovative companies to grow their revenue. The article describes the goals and the advantages of KOTS, the components that make up KOTS, as well as an overview for the first application of KOTS.

Next, Ludovico Prattico and I describe the first application of the KOTS platform, which is the Carleton Entrepreneurs program. This unique program helps graduate and senior undergraduate students transform their ideas into compelling opportunities and successful businesses and strengthens the entrepreneurial spirit at Carleton University. KOTS is the engine behind the program’s website and will support a collective comprised of students, mentors, internal and external reviewers, top managers of technology university spin-off companies, academics, and friends of Carleton. Members of the collective operate initiatives in all three horizons.

Michael Ayukawa answers the question: “What is a good deal?” by reviewing the literature on deals and deal-making processes. His answer to this question was used to define the business rules embodied in a component of the KOTS platform named Make a Deal (MAD). A key contribution from this paper is that deal goodness can be separated based on a Me-We construct: the impact to each and every stakeholder of the deal and the impact to the entire collective (not just the deal stakeholders).

David Péloquin, Jean Kunz, and Nicola Gaye provide an approach to risk management that can be generalized to any situation where social actors respond to and manage risks in a multi-player environment. The authors describe how different social actors assess risk differently and introduce the “social management of risk” approach. The approach focuses on the involvement of potential actors in pursuing societal objectives in relation to risk. They use the approach to discuss the role of the community sector in the social management of risk.

Michael Weiss discusses a model for company-led open source projects around two dimensions: the level of control over the project and the diversity of applications derived from the project. The article then explores how the model can be interpreted from a product line engineering perspective. The article reflects a recent trend towards collectives of companies that develop shared assets in the form of open source projects.

Tony Bailetti

Guest Editor

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