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. However, research on the 'private-collective' model of innovation (PCI) focuses on either private or collective governance separately, with the former focusing on the firm and the latter anchoring on self-organized communities. DAOs offer an opportunity to unpack the interaction between the private and collective governance mechanisms and their influence on collective innovation. Analyzing 45 DAO development communities from April 2013 to April 2018, we find that community governance promotes collective innovation; this effect weakens when interacting with centralized control. This study contributes to the PCI literature by establishing a deeper understanding of the private-collective innovation continuum and the interaction of the two models.
