Through facilitation by our makerspace partners within the clusters Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Berlin and Vienna, 17 SMEs were successfully enabled to co-develop OSH products and services with makers and communities of individuals and groups of consumers, users and customers.
Defining the needs and capabilities as well as drafting an envisaged user journey for the makerspace-SMEs collaboration took place in the first year, followed by a nine-month open source development journey of our six SME partners within the clusters Amsterdam, Berlin and Copenhagen. During this phase, tools, models, framework and ICT infrastructure were built and tested together with the SME pilots to gather feedback and perform modifications. These were utilised for verification during the demonstration phase as part of a combined facilitation offering with further eleven SME cases (selected out of around 30 interested applicants). Those were acquired through a call for collaboration between Nov. 2021 and Jan. 2022 to participate freely and lasted between three and six months each. In 2022, our four makerspace partners worked closely together with the eleven SME demonstrator cases to carve out realistic goals and realise them together with the entire OPEN_NEXT team. Different roles emerged within the makerspaces which were case-based and required a high level of adaptability: acting as matchmaker; provider of facilities for prototyping and exchange; serving communication and moderation needs; facilitating a collaborative working culture; managing the co-creation processes; and enabler of understanding roles, motivation and responsibilities.
Several tools, guidelines, methods, standards and supporting ICT infrastructure features were developed and validated during OPEN_NEXT. The Library for OSH Hardware (LOSH) provides a stable search service for finding projects/parts for design reuse OSH (losh.opennext.eu/). The Wikifactory platform extends their existing offering (wikifactory.com) with features such as: an import-export tool avoiding platform lock-ins; a new format to host open calls of SMEs for crowdsourcing of ideas, designs, documentation from the OSH community; and a collaborative manufacturing platform for matchmaking and quoting for distributed manufacturing. A model for maturity assessment of OSH development in company-community collaboration (C3) was developed that allows to identify, assess and improve OSH projects. A refined demonstrator of a project status dashboard that allows to analyse OSH projects was developed and tested on the platform GitHub and partially out rolled on Wikifactory. Furthermore, documentation guidelines were shared as open access resources on Wikifactory and GitHub which enable design reuse by OSH projects.
Significant knowledge and insights could be created on how to derive and establish open business models for SMEs with a dedicated toolkit. The recombination of building blocks for certain conventional business models was most fruitful which were found to be: platforming, leverage through communities, ecosystem infrastructure, consulting services, crowd- and third-party funding, and selling hardware products.
The SMEs reported positive outcomes on sales, sustainability and innovation capacity. In addition to the new business models, the establishment of networks is cited as a reason for better profitability and better sales. This is also because of the much-increased visibility of the SMEs and their products and their presentations on diverse digital platforms.
By creating open source/access results, they were carved out to ensure long term sustainability beyond the project duration. Envisaged users of results are mainly SMEs, the OSH community, makerspaces, future research projects on the topic of OSH, amongst others.
The following two new entities were formed and will further exploit some of the results after the end of the project:
The European Open Hardware Alliance (EUOHA) for promoting collaborative production engineering practices and networking of labs, SMEs, citizens and other OSH actors in Europe.
The OHO - Open Hardware Observatory e.V. for publishing and certifying OSH (registered 05/21).
