A striking phenomenon in recent years has been the rise of open source software. Source codes are freely revealed via the Internet, allowing geographically distributed programmers to download and utilize the software, to suggest improvements to the community, or to make modifications themselves and to redistribute their modified code. A large number of successful examples of open source software programs have been developed and extensive research has been undertaken to analyze this phenomenon from different perspectives (von Krogh & von Hippel, 2006b).
It is hard to imagine any topic more central to society than innovation. All change, whether revolutionary or evolutionary, requires innovation (Schumpeter, 1911, 1934).
In the following chapter I attempt to clarify what will be studied throughout this thesis and how the data will be collected and analyzed. The term ‘Open Source Innovation’ will be defined and a conceptual framework for studying this topic will be presented. Along this framework I develop a more detailed set of questions for my research and propose resulting propositions to connect questions to data. In the last section my combination of research methodologies to best approach these questions and study the phenomenon of open source innovation will be explained.
Until recently, limitations to the availability of successful empirical examples of open design projects have caused a noticeable gap in the scientific literature. In the following chapter I provide a quantitative study (n = 104) of relevant projects. My goal is to explore the landscape of open source development in the world of atoms, to analyze project characteristics, structures, and success, and to investigate similarities and dissimilarities to open source software development.
At this early stage of research on the open design phenomenon keeping an encompassing view seems advantageous as discussed in Chapter 4. Drawing on six comparative case studies, I analyze the workings of open design in the following chapter.
The potential of external volunteers for product (co-)development was demonstrated starkly by the success of OSS development in recent years. In view of this phenomenon, many experts from academia and practice suggest that the ‘open source model’ may be applicable to other industries. This assumption notwithstanding, little is known about the preconditions, opportunities and barriers of OS development in other domains, especially concerning the open design of physical products (Lerner & Tirole, 2002). My first two empirical studies aim to point out the recent upsurge of practical cases (Chapter 5 treating research question 1) and to derive first tentative findings on the mechanism of the open design model of new product development (Chapter 6 treating research question 2).
To investigate the meaning and importance of openness from a community’s perspective, I need to approach open design projects. I hence decided to conduct a web-based questionnaire survey in 20 communities associated with projects developing physical products following an open source development methodology. The focus of this research is to explore the relevance of openness and its aspects and to draw conclusions on developer satisfaction. Particularly the difference between software and hardware components shall be investigated in close detail.
In the following chapter one- and two-sample t-tests are performed to support or reject my research hypotheses blocks H1, H2, and H3 based on my survey results. I aim to analyze respondent’s attitude towards the importance of openness and its aspects and differences in these regards between software and hardware. In addition general perceptions of different degrees of openness shall be investigated.
My third empirical study strikingly reveals that openness is important to developer communities and that this is not just a matter of course. Openness of software components is more important than openness of hardware components. Replicability is perceived less important than accessibility and transparency. Highly active developers indicate higher importance ratings than less active developers, while the duration of participation does not influence the indicated importance.
In this thesis I argue that open source development does indeed seem feasible for tangible products and that open design is a rapidly evolving field holding a lot of opportunities.
This research is grounded in the theory on productive resources and dynamic capabilities. Following Sanchez (2004), for example, firm-addressable resources outside a firm can and should be used to complement internal resources and capabilities. Chesbrough et al. (2006) were one of the first who systematically emphasized that firms can and should use external ideals and internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology. A concept, which they named open innovation and which today is widely accepted in theory and practice.