Description: Personal blog about open source, open hardware.
Over the past decade, I’ve been researching open source and technology innovation, partly through employment at multiple different companies who engage in open source, and partly through academic work towards completing a Master’s degree and soon starting a PhD. The heart of this research is looking into what makes companies successful at open source and also at technology innovation. It turns out there are actually many things in common between the two.
One of the lines of research that’s relevant to this topic explores organizational capabilities . These capabilities are the knowledge that individuals have at a company, but they’re also the abilities the company as a whole has built into their processes, into their business, and into their employees. Capabilities can be learned over time, so a company isn’t frozen to a fixed point of capabilities that can never change, but it does take time to build up new capabilities or strengthen existing capabilities.
Another relevant line of research explores open innovation , which was first proposed by Henry Chesbrough in the 2000s, but has been through a number of different iterations over the decade plus since then. In some ways, open innovation is similar to open source, but it’s not quite open source and people get confused about that. The fundamental concept of open innovation is that innovation in general—and this can be technology innovation or business innovation—can be accelerated if companies are willing to