Makerspace as an innovation community has been a new and fresh mode of innovation for a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs these past few years. And as a community where the members have an equal chance to utilize the resources available at hand, there are a lot of prevalent problems that exist inside makerspaces. The free-riding problem has been troubling a lot of communities, especially innovation communities where people could easily use the resources available. There are a lot of ways to handle this problem, and the 2009 Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom proposed eight governing principles in which the resources in common-pool resources communities could be managed. The 8 principles, which are built upon a self-managing and reciprocal social system, are embodied in two community-level attributes, namely perceived equality and perceived discretion. As the fundamental norms of the common-pool resource community, the amateur innovators' perceived equality and discretion profoundly influence their social behavior and innovative activities by influencing how they share, retrieve, and preserve community resources. User innovation has been recognized as a springboard for users' entrepreneurial attempts, but little is known about the amateur innovators' community's role in cultivating entrepreneurship. In this study, we explore how the governing principles affect the entrepreneurial feasibility and desirability of makers inside makerspaces. Furthermore, we investigate the impacts of makers' innovation self-efficacy on their entrepreneurial intentions through the mediating effects of entrepreneurial cognition.
We gathered data from 718 founders and active members of makerspaces across America, Asia, and Europe, including 14 major makerspaces around the world. Our results show that perceived equality strengthens the relationship between innovation self-efficacy and entrepreneurial discretion. However, perceived discretion does not strengthen the relationship between innovation self-efficacy and entrepreneurial cognition. We also found that entrepreneurial cognition acts as a channel for innovation self-efficacy to form the entrepreneurial feasibility and desirability of makers.

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