[Source: “Bending the Rules: The Fab Lab Innovation Ecology| Peter Troxler, Patricia Wolf]
Open Innovation:
- “Rise of individuals collaborating in producing cultural content, knowledge, and other information and indeed physical goods, is commonly attributed to ‘digital revolutions’, the broad availability of new information technologies.”
- Digital Revolutions:
- Computation (personal computer)–>Communications (convergence and mobile phones)
- Next Digital Revolution: Field of Manufactured Physical Goods (personal fabrication)
- Fab Labs (fabrication laboratories) are ‘place[s] to make (almost) anything’ (Gershenfeld, 2005) and offer access to a range of low-cost fabricators and they are based on an commons-based peer production approach.
- Current theories of open innovation has no explanation for the growth or even the existence of commons-based peer production: ‘puzzle of Open Source Software’.
- Users freely revealing their innovations has surprised innovation researchers.
- The major issue is the absence of a business model built around intellectual property rights (Chesborogh 2006, 25):
- “By construction, open source software is created without any one firm owning the technology. No firm can patent the technology, or exclude anyone else from accessing the software code. Enhancements to the code are available to everyone on an equal basis. Is this simply an exception to the general rule [i.e. that the value of a technology is determined by the business model], is this due to a business model of a different kind, or is there something fundamentally wrong with the above claims of Open Innovation regarding the importance of business model for the behavior of firm?”
- ‘Intellectual property rights have at best only a weak and indirect effect on economic growth’. (Bensen & Meurer, 2008)
- Static approaches of business modeling have been contrasted by the need for business model innovation and the growing number of social entrepreneurs. (Osterwalder, 2009|Elkington & Harigan, 2008)
Muumba 