Decentralized autonomous organizations and collective innovation: an empirical investigation

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of community governance on collective innovation in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). While DAOs are structured as self-organized communities such as open source software development (OSSD) communities for collective value creation, DAOs differ from OSSD in that they can financially incentivize contributors with cryptocurrency tokens, enabling private value appropriation. DAOs offer an opportunity to unpack the interaction between the private and collective governance mechanisms and their influence on collective innovation. Analyzing DAO development communities, we find that community governance promotes collective innovation; this effect weakens when interacting with centralized control.