Collaboration and Trust-building in Open Innovation Community

Growing popularity of open innovation communities poses various challenges for business practice. One of them is trust, which facilitates social interaction, provides basis for risk-taking and strengthens cooperation. In virtual environment traditional mechanisms of its development are unavailable. However, in many companies using virtual teams trust is created, maintained and capitalized, which provides indication that it may be developed in other ways. In this paper, the authors present a study of work within testing community in computer game industry based on two-year qualitative fieldwork, which may serve as an example of trust emergence in virtual environment. (original abstract)