Authors: Jara Pascual, Vilma Puriene, Colin Petruno, Krisjanis Krakops, Abdulkadir Nuhu, Khairool Adzelan Aman, Hazwan Razak, Mohamad Amir Shariff
Open source software and digital tools are a collaborative and altruistic effort by a motivated community with an impact-driven mindset. However, achieving the economic and political impact is difficult to reach from informal community structures where there is minimal governance structure designed for those types of impacts.
This paper is from a practitioner perspective who is working with communities and governments for open innovation policies. Data was collected from the European Parliament and European Commission, and other countries such Malaysia, Lithuania, and Nigeria. The specific open source, research, and innovation communities focused on technologies and business sectors within biodiversity, AI, web3, IoT, space and photonics.
The work is using the following 4 frameworks (Pascual, 2021): “Collaboration Canvas” (Fig.8), “Innovation Ecosystem and Community Canvas” (Fig.4), “Emotional Intelligence Canvas” (Fig.7) and the “Framework Emotional intelligence for Innovation” (Fig.6) to help open innovation community coordinators to support their stakeholders, academics, entrepreneurs, policy makers and business to establish a collaborative and ecosystem mindset for open research, open innovation and open collaboration within the community and ecosystem.
It is relevant to update the role of the OSPO communities and their objectives to provide innovative solutions to politicians, government and businesses, to be self-sustaining with open innovation business models. Some barriers found during our work are the lack of digitalization knowledge and how to use open source digital tools, lack of knowledge and expertise of communities and ecosystem coordination in person, and digital coordination of ecosystems and communities. All those challenges are horizontally impacted by the feeling and emotional fatigue of the difficulty and tiredness of open source digital tools, due to too many tools for specific functionalities and tasks.
When talking about collaboration to adopt open source solutions as an open innovation approach from the communities, some conclusions are that the onboarding process is key for the engagement into the ecosystem and community to explain norms rules and increase the level of multi-directional impact, and set up the “tone” of helping each other and how to enable this mindset from policy and programs perspective. Another takeaway is the creation of an education plan (onboarding + continuous learning), and group mentoring/coaching for ecosystem and community coordinators such as OSPO about collaboration and having a project manager to hand-hold every new partner and stakeholder for their micro-ecosystems and communities.
It’s concluded that the easy access, visualization of technologies and applications in a format of “showcases” increase the adoption of open source technologies.