Remodel: One-stop shop for designing open source hardware business models

REMODEL helps manufacturing companies develop new business models based on open source and distributed design principles. You can do it too.

by Christian Villum - Director of Digital & Future Thinking, Danish Design Centre.

[photos can be chosen freely from this repository: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Igo6cBE5FcMImmHRAkoH2Fcy6RzLPHW0?usp=sharing - photographer Agnete Schlichtkrull under a Creative Commons BY-NC license]

The concept of open source collaboration - a distributed design practice - is really booming globally and increasingly provides a foundation for innovative business in all corners of the world, especially in the field of virtual products and software. Hardware, however – in the broadest sense of the word – is one of the newest frontier for the open source mindset, and perhaps represents the biggest potential paradigm shift for how we design, manufacture and consume products. In Danish Design Centre, over the last 2 years, we have looked with curiosity towards the future to see how open source principles can be brought into the realm of physical product manufacturing on a massive mainstream scale.

Challenging the nature of manufacturing physical products The nature of creating physical products (atoms) is, of course, very different than that of virtual products (bits) because of the innate costs of its physicality: It requires acquiring materials, handling logistics, investing in machinery, setting up distribution, upkeeping shelf space and, of course, the actual fabrication of the goods as opposed to the intangible essence of a virtual product. This is why opening the design for reappropriation by potential competitors seems so counter-productive: Why would you add more risk to the already gargantuan gamble you have taken on? The answer is of course that the rights might be overly outweighed by the possible gains. As this book outlines, the innovation excellence, scalability and pace by which designs can evolve when successfully open sourced and distributed among a large community of competent co-creators presents, potentially, a brand new kind of business case: The idea of the open source, distributed strategy and business model.

Still some hesitation More and more open source hardware companies are emerging, and we are already seeing some successful business ventures in this realm on the international stage (both in big tech, but also among digitally native upstarts). Still, in general, there is a widespread hesitation towards experimenting with opening IP-rights for physical products. Mainly this is because the very concept radically contradicts the convention of using copyrights and patents to control supply/demand mechanisms, protect investments in manufacturing infrastructure and to stay competitive. But one need not dive very deep in the success stories to see the potential.

The question really is: What are the tools and methods needed to build a new, open and distributed business strategy for your product? Here is a stab at answering that question.

Experimenting with strategic design approaches In the spring of 2018, [10 Danish manufacturing companies: https://danskdesigncenter.dk/en/10-manufacturing-companies-are-ready-experiment-open-source] went through the REMODEL programme, launched by Danish Design Centre and co-designed with an [international expert panel:https://danskdesigncenter.dk/en/remodel-expert-panel] (which, by the way, includes several familiar faces from the Distributed Design Market Platform project consortium).

The cohort of companies ranged from large corporations like enzyme mastodon Novozymes and the world's biggest water pump manufacturer Grundfos all the way down to small and medium sized companies like industrial tool manufacturer Thürmer Tools, electronics innovators Tekpartner and furniture company Stykka.

Over the course of 3 months these companies went through a custom-made, self-directed design sprint in which they worked for half a day per week and went from having very little knowledge about the very concept of open source towards emerging as proficient open source innovators in their specific industry domain. More over the process guided them through drafting a strategy for one of their existing products.

Introducing the REMODEL toolkit The process they went through served as prototype testing of the REMODEL toolkit: a design-sprint toolbox that enables any company to harness the power of open source principles to build new business strategies and business models around new or existing products. Especially manufacturers of hardware (physical products) can take advantage of this new resource to radically rethink how they innovate and scale their business through open source and distributed design practices.

You will find the free and ready-to-use toolkit here: https://remodel.dk/.

The toolkit contains guides, video tutorials and a peer to peer support forum which allows a company to not only ignite and self-direct their own transformation journey, but also to find inspiration and proof of concept in the write-ups of business cases from the 10 companies that went through the original REMODEL program.

In addition, for those interested in taking a deeper look under the hood of the process that shaped the toolkit, simply dive into the learning repository here: https://danskdesigncenter.dk/en/remodel.

An open source toolkit for further appropriation The entire toolkit itself is, of course, open source: It is published under one of the most open and liberal licenses available, namely the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. In other words it comes with an invitation for further re-appropriation and asks practitioners, facilitators, designers and innovation agents to take what we’ve made and make it your own, build on it, share it, sell it – do whatever you want with it. We would love to hear what you come up with.

Post note: Some time after the launch of the REMODEL toolkit we also got the opportunity to convert it into a simpler, more lightweight online course on the Canopy Lab learning platform. This version takes aim at individuals (whereas the toolkit is directed at company teams). Take a look at the course here: [https://student.canopylab.com/public/course-preview/329/].