Current state of practices in open source product development

Open source innovation is a well-studied phenomenon of the ICT sector, but its evolution towards the field of tangible hardware product development is a newer phenomenon which remains mostly theoretical. Existing literature has identified that to push existing open source product development (OSPD) practice towards the achievement of high quality complex products, methods and tools adapted to this specific organisation of work are needed. The objective of this article is to explore the practices emerging from OSPD communities in order to support the development of appropriate process support in the future. It reports first observations made during a qualitative and comparative empirical study performed with participants of 23 OSPD projects through semi-directed interviews. Activating a formerly published framework, these observations address four themes: the organizational structure of OSPD’s surrounding communities, their design process, their underlying business models and the supporting online tools they use. The preliminary results are delivered to the engineering design and management scientific community as an impulse for further research.