Community Enterprises-An Institutional Innovation

Management research has focused on for-profit firms. Recently Wikipedia and Linux have emerged that we call Community Enterprises. They are not-for-profit organizations producing innovation resources and making them freely available. They collide with firms, which aim at acquiring control of resources. Although contributing substantially to the economy, they suffer from not being able to quantify their contributions adequately. We analyze them as aliens in the market economy and to the theory of the firm, discussing which measures must be applied to ensure their activities, and which assumptions must be revised to encompass their potential as a source of economic value.