Facilitation offerings
for SMEs as part of the OPEN!NEXT demonstrator phase
We're with you all the way
Open Source is based on the idea that intellectual resources should be free to use, redistribute and modify.
Based on the discoveries and learnings uncovered in the pilot phase, the OPEN!NEXT consortium presents a series of tools, guidelines and offerings tailored to ensure a smoother sailing through the open source hardware journey. Upon consulting a makerspace partner, SMEs taking part in the demonstrator phase may choose to leverage one or more offerings.
NOTE: A number of the offerings are under continuous development.
FO-1: Documentation Guidelines and Standards
Documentation is an essential aspect of Open Source Hardware. OPEN!NEXT offers helpful guidelines and insights on standards for documenting your OSH project on Wikifactory and/or GitHub.
The OPEN!NEXT guidelines are organised in blocks matching a corresponding phase in the project development. Specifically, the guidelines enable you to disseminate vital information, share knowledge about the project, and allows for transparency, replication, modification, distribution and more.
FO-2: Online Repository and Community Building
This set of tools and features help Open Source Hardware projects navigate and utilise online repositories for their research, ideation phase, documentation, manufacturing, distirbution and community building.
Value for SMEs include: Streamlining ideation by giving easy search access to existing projects, help to develop/access online communities, access to online features to assist OSH development, avoid locking your OSH project to a single platform by allowing for easy import/export, easy access to production facilitators and companies, access to prototyping labs/makerspaces and easy monitoring of project/community health online.
LOSH: the Internet of Open Hardware
The Library of Open Source Hardware (LOSH) defines representative metadata for OSH, which also feeds the distributed database of LOSH. Thereby, OSH designs become searchable across different online platforms and are available as Linked Open Data (LOD), while OSH developers can still freely choose their favorite online platform for publishing and development.
The end users in mind are:
- Developers: the whole thing here is first and foremost about design reuse
- Manufacturers / service providers: find OSH published under a free/open license (we perform quality checks) so that you can modify, replicate and exploit OSH products however, you like e.g. for cases of decentralized (mass) production, maintenance, and service provision – or just for yourself
Dive in: Library of Open Source Hardware
FO-3: Business Model Toolkit
The business model toolkit is a collection of different tools for SMEs and start-ups interested in the development of products and services for their OSH project. It can be used to ideate and validate revenue streams and business models and consists of a set of workshop-based modules to develop viable scenarios for community engagement:
- Community/stakeholders group definition, analysis.
- Identifying the sources/challenges of revenues for business models.
- Value mapping, assumption mapping, and how to validate those assumptions.
- How a community-oriented company works with a focus on what to be opened and what to remain closed having in mind the competitive advantage of the company.
The business model toolkit is designed to fit different stages of the project and can be implemented accordingly.
FO-4: Peer-2-peer Support
The P2P offering is a set of facilitated sessions aimed at establishing a connection to exchange challenges, experiences and opportunities between similar SMEs from within and beyond the OPENNEXT project.
More concretely, this offering will ensure that SMEs can gain direct help with specific challenges by connecting them to supportive peers and communities.
FO-5: C3 Maturity Assessment
The OPEN!NEXT maturity model is developed to help businesses identify, assess and improve their company-community collaboration (C3) capabilities.
More specifically, the model helps identify gaps and gives SMEs a grasp of their individual needs. In the OPEN!NEXT project, the model is used to ensure that SMEs can be connected to the right OPEN!NEXT consortium expert at the right time of their development process, in order to help them leverage and improve company-community collaboration.
