Collaboration Is Now Making Hardware Easier

Collaborative Innovation has been considered best practice in innovation for a few years now. By CI, we mean a philosophy for the design and development of products and services that abandons both traditional vision of the innovative start-up that enjoys temporary monopoly power on its innovations: The company thus overcomes the fears raised by sharing sensitive industrial information. In fact, this is a form of innovation that embraces the opportunities afforded by the sharing of information and knowledge.
CI made its debut in R&D labs in the design and marketing functions of the companies that have been more open to change both locally and globally. Cases range from co-design occurring through a web of alliances (such in Big Pharma) or in industries where innovation occurs through customers and researchers sharing experience and knowledge (Procter & Gamble and L'Oreal), to integrally co-created forms of innovation (InnoCentive, Threadless and Lego) or co-creation by communities orchestrated by the users themselves (such as in Linux). Thus CI seems to have taken an irreversible path of industrial diffusion. Today there are only two factors slowing down diffusion: the cultural outlook of many operators and the material nature of products. Overcoming fears and risks associated with the sharing of a valuable asset such as innovation represents a challenge that will require many years to be metabolized. CI imposes the abandonment of the purely economic logic of exchange (as the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics, Elinor Ostrom teaches), in favor of an approach linked to less rational aspects, which are not easy to accept for a generation used to a proprietary notion of innovation. The second aspect concerns instead the constraints on interaction affecting tangible products. The words that enable people to co-innovate on Wikipedia, and the codes that enable Linux to appropriate the knowledge of multiple users, are a lot more amenable to CI than the products and services of traditional industries. One of the first cases of Open Source Hardware (OSH) helps us understand how to overcame the latter obstacle. OSH is an emergent practice in the development of various products, from synthesizers to cell phones. Hundreds of hardware inventors have started to publish their product specifications, giving life to a stream of innovations unimagined at the source. From OSH new entrepreneurial ventures have emerged. One is Arduino, the first open-source microcontroller. The firm that created Arduino (https://tinker.it) makes available online all the commercial secrets of this new type of electronic circuit: in addition to software, the company makes available to users the specifics and original blueprints of the electronic parts. By downloading them, anybody can build an Arduino by themselves and customize it to implement it within their own product, be it a personal robot or a car engine.

This way, OSH has characterized itself for being that process which enables the separation of the physicality of the object from its design component. You work starting from a source code which is then adapted to a variety of products for which a solution can be imagined. CI works by stimulating the creativity and entrepreneurship of individuals. Thanks to OSH, collaborative innovation starts enjoying credibility also in industrial contexts hitherto inaccessible because of physical constraints. By doing so, it opens yet other gates to the future of innovation.