Success factors for Company-Community-Collaboration in Open-Source Hardware Development facilitated by Makerspaces

After having revolutionized the software market, open-source sharing and co-creation has now reached the field of hardware development. Companies and all kinds of communities collaborate in developing free hardware solutions, including and simultaneously sharing vast collective knowledge resources. Makerspaces as open collaboration spaces with large communities can play a key role in such collaboration when it comes to building up and maintaining a community around an open-source hardware development project. In the OPENNEXT project, funded by the European Union, four makerspaces over a period of three years ran 18 such development projects, mediating between companies and communities. We accompanied the process as research partners, narrowing down success factors by means of qualitative analyses of stakeholder interviews and stakeholder workshops, finally deriving four areas of success factors with four major success factors.