This is part of a serious of blogposts about the REMODEL programme at The Danish Design Centre

As mentioned in our most recent article, REMODEL has design principles baked into the very fabric of the sprint. This means we have dedicated no less than 3 phases out of the total number of 7 phases to actual outreach: Soliciting feedback from actual users, making tests of the emerging prototype and, most importantly, challenging assumptions.

Phase 6: Mentor feedback community testing round two

In this phase, the companies received invaluable input from the two international expert mentors from the REMODEL Expert Panel, whom they sent their materials to in the last phase. The mentors were a dream team of global thought leaders and cutting-edge experimenters from across the open source global arena: Benjamin Tincq from Good Tech Lab (Brazil/France), Diderik van Wingerden from Open Innovation (Netherlands), Jaime Arredondo from Bold & Open (France), Lars Zimmermann from Open It Agency (Germany), Peter Troxler from Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, Paul Stacey from Open Education Consortium and Vasilis Niaros from P2P Foundation.

Each REMODEL company received detailed written feedback from two mentors each, who made a complete review of the materials and then, as part of this 6th phase, engaged in a discussion with the companies in a Skype session to challenge them and their business strategies as well as helped them incorporate the open source principles in the right way.

Following this call, the companies updated your system map and pitch according to the feedback and then continued to solicit more feedback: Namely from their potential community of co-creators by interviewing a key stakeholder in their ecosystem.

What did we learn? Start small and experiment your way forward

Tons of learnings have poured in from this phase, and we will focus specifically on the great feedback we received from our mentors. Moreover, for article brevity, we will limit ourselves to present you with three of the best ones here, while stressing that all the other learnings will be included in our grand documentation at the end of the REMODEL program:

Avoid getting overwhelmed, start out small:
The first dominant pattern in much of the great work being done in the companies is that it is really easy to get overwhelmed by where to start when transitioning towards an open business model for a product, mainly because (as we learned earlier on) it is not necessarily ideal to open source it all; instead it can make sense to open source certain elements in which co-creation lends particular opportunity.

Then there is also the community establishment (and maintenance) work pile (how to do it properly? We’ll get more into that in Phase 7) and there is the whole communication issues in terms of telling the work about it – and finally, and most importantly, who in the organisation will lead this effort and handle as well as grow the community? Do we have the resources and skills or do we need to hire?

The list of questions goes on. All of a sudden this seems to add up to a gigantic task. But it does not have to be, as pointed out by one of the mentors, Diderik van Wingerten: Instead, a much better approach is to start small, really small, and see what works by trial-and-error. Start with one product or just one element in that product. Find a user group among your customers, test it out with them. Then later scale up when a certain approach goes well. Note: As we write up business cases on the 10 companies over the coming months, you will see some concrete examples of this approach.

“You need someone in the company who understands open source, the value of it, and is keen on making it successful.”

Make sure you have the right project lead on board: 
The manpower/skillset issue mentioned above leads to the next point: It is starting to be quite clear that in order to go from theory to practice and to see the open source-based business strategy/model get implemented requires some very specific rootsetting to actually become realized, noted mentor Diderik van Wingerten in another comment.

In order for a company to step into the open economy, they will need an anchor person who is dedicated to the mission. That passionate person who is keen to face challenges head-on, conquer obstacles and be the guiding light for everyone on the team in order to succeed and ensure the desired yield. Building and implementing new business models is always somewhat of a struggle but becomes even a little more demanding when you are pioneering new innovation, for instance by using open source principles.

But with greater risk often comes greater reward. And for that, you need the right person in the organisation. As mentor Diderik additionally pointed out: “You need someone in the company who understands open source, the value of it, and is keen on making it successful. It is a bit like working according to Scrum: the theory is easily learned in a course, but to really get the value means you do need to have an experienced Scrum Master by your side day today.”

The need for digital adeptness:
And this leads us to another related learning, as presented by another one of the mentors, Jaime Arredondo: Digital aptness in the organization in general, at least in the team that leads the open sourcing efforts. You cannot simply expect that taking a physical product, open sourcing its design (or parts thereof) and expecting your stakeholders (as well as other potential co-creators) to understand that or, on top of that, engage themselves in it in a new way. Your organization needs a digital presence, adeptness in communicating and acting online and moreover be able to lead projects in the digital realm.

Otherwise, the key interaction with your users will either not happen or, if it does, might not lead to the kind of interaction you imagine or desire. This digital adeptness is something that many small to medium-sized manufacturing companies may not have, since their key expertise in the pre-digital age was to manufacture. This is changed with the advent of the Internet and the digital era; companies large and small needs at least a basic foundation (skill-wise, mindset-wise, and leadership-wise) of digital proficiency. This is hardly news to anyone, but – as we learn now in REMODEL – quite crucial for the successful business implementation of open source principles.

As mentioned we have stockpiled loads of more insights and learnings from this work phase and will publish everything over the coming months in the toolkit. In the meantime, we want to use this opportunity to recommend anyone looking for qualified expert business input in open sourcing innovation to get in touch with the REMODEL experts and mentors. You will find an overview of their competencies and other data here.

More learnings to be shared from the next (and also final) 7th phase. Stay tuned.

This is the fifth blog post of the REMODEL programme. Read number one, number two, number three and number four here.

Learn more

Curious to follow the REMODEL program in more depth? Read more here or sign up for the newsletter. Eager to discuss? Join the conversation on Twitter under the #remodelDK hashtag or contact Danish Design Centre Programme Director Christian Villum on [email protected]

The post Combining HANDS-ON EXPERIMENTATION with expert input: Our week 6 learnings in REMODEL appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is part of a serious of blogposts about the REMODEL programme at The Danish Design Centre

One thing that is really challenging when open sourcing your product is to actually embrace the input coming from your community members: User-driven innovation is hard, and it is not always fun hearing the honest truth from your customers as you engage with them and invite them to become co-creators. This 5th phase in the REMODEL program pushed the companies to start imagining what it means to meet their community.

As the work of the participating companies has started to reach a mature conceptual stage, we have now entered the last half of the program which focuses on reaching out, soliciting feedback from different stakeholders, scoping a potential community and continually iterating and finetuning the new, open source-based strategy for their product. A mix of classic design steps and a venture into the still largely uncharted territory of open source hardware business model making and community building. In other words: The hard part is no longer grappling with understanding the concepts of open source and how to apply it in their own specific manufacturing industry, but rather to start to look beyond their own resources and into the global reservoir of expertise that is the Internet.

Phase 5 – Community testing round one

In the 5th phase of REMODEL, the 10 companies are starting to engaging with what can potentially become their community of co-creators. Concretely through organizing a hackathon (in a board-game style simulation exercise) to collect feedback from imagined stakeholders like makers, hackers, designers, pro-users and even investors. Next, they revise their “System Maps” and “Open-o-Meters” (as introduced in earlier phases of the program) based on that feedback. Lastly, they send all their materials to their mentors from the REMODEL Expert Panel for review and commenting.

Hack-a-thon: The boardgame

One way to get (early) feedback on an idea or a product – as well as to take the first steps of building a community of co-creators – is to organize a “hackathon”. A hackathon is an event in which external people (and often the general public) is invited to join a session of exploration and co-creation around a challenge set by the organizer of the event: In this case, it would be to give feedback on the open product idea and to help make it better. A hackathon is originally a highly design-driven way of collaborative problem-solving and creative tinkering coming out of the maker-world, but a concept which has increasingly been picked up in the corporate world to create rapid prototypes. In any case, it is a great, quick and informal way of inviting stakeholders (and other curious people) into a high-yield discussion and co-creation exercise.

To ensure the REMODEL program remains lightweight and easy to go through, however, we opted to not have the companies run an actual hackathon, but instead simulate one. This happened through the REMODEL hackathon boardgame:

In the boardgame the company organizes a hackathon: They start out by drawing persona-cards that represent people who you could expect would show up at a hackathon, such as makers, pro-users and designers. The company is also instructed in pitching their open product idea (in front of a camera) to make sure all the imagined attendees actually understands what the company wants them to do. The company then draws question cards that present them with challenging questions and critique as if spoken by the personas. All this fuels a discussion on the company’s work team and gives valuable input that really challenges the existing product concept.

Feedback from experts in the field

After simulating the hackathon and revising their concept and materials according to the reflections coming out of the hackathon, the company sent their work materials for review by their two assigned mentors from the REMODEL Expert Panel: As an invaluable resource in exploring cutting-edge open source strategies and business models, REMODEL draws upon the expertise of some of the world’s finest experts in the field including business developers, consultants, academics, CEOs, thought leaders and activists. As part of the REMODEL design sprint, the companies get to solicit feedback from these experts and discuss in depth their specific approach towards open source business development.

Key learnings: It is hard to engage with a community, but even harder to motivate it

For several of the companies, the hackathon-exercise was quite a revelation of the kind of blunt input (and expectations) that a vested community can present the community organizer with. The board game had questions such as:  “Who is going to offer support to modify the product?” and “I would like to copy and sell your open product, is that okay then?”. The reflections from the companies were many and included:

• A community will challenge your assumptions: It is really, really hard to predict what the community will want to do with your open product. You cannot assume your way forward but have to relinquish control to a certain extent. This is an advantage because the more agency you give your community, the more innovation space it will have.
• Motivating your community is hard: The “build it and they will come”-approach often doesn’t work; you need to actively work to get them involved, especially in the beginning. Why should they spend their time as co-creators? What is in it for them that they could not get before (when the product was proprietary/closed) or with your competitor?
• A whole new level of user involvement: One of the companies really hit the head on the nail by saying that what open sourcing really is is customer involvement on steroids: To base your product on a real demand (which is design’s ABC), you need the input of the people with a need that your product addresses. No need, no sale. Customer-insight (and hence input) is the key to success. No input is better than what you get from a customer who feels a sense of co-ownership of the product. A customer who is vested in the continued development and improvement of the product. This is what you get from those who join the community as co-creators.

Stay tuned for the recap of the 6th week of the REMODEL sprint and many more learnings!

This is the fourth blog post of the REMODEL programme. Read number one, number two and number three here

Learn more

Curious to follow the REMODEL program in more depth? Read more here or sign up for the newsletter. Eager to discuss? Join the conversation on Twitter under the #remodelDK hashtag or contact Danish Design Centre Programme Director Christian Villum on [email protected]

The post The perils of INVITING STAKEHOLDERS into your community: Our learnings from the 5th week appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Koppelting is an annual grassroots festival about peer production and free/libre alternatives for society. It is filled with projects, lectures, debates and workshops, and is co-created by the attendees. Anyone can contribute, whether by giving a lecture, a workshop or demonstration, or by simply participating, helping out and engaging in good discussion.

De WAR

Koppelting is held at De WAR in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, home to the world’s first 100% open source fablab and the experimental cooperative University of Amersfoort.

21 –  27 August 2017

The weekend of 26 and 27 August will be used for lectures and workshops, in the week before an open hackathon will focus on a number of dedicated projects.

Cost

Participation in the hackathon during the week is free. For the weekend, a fee is required, using a decide-yourself pricing model aiming at an average of €50 per person. This will cover basic costs of the location, breakfast, lunch, coffee and tea, video-registration of the talks and travel expenses for some of the speakers. See the costs for details.

Programme

If you would like to present something, have an idea for a hackaton project, suggest someone else for a presentation, or otherwise want to contribute, we are happy to hear about his. Registration for the festival and submission of presentations can be done on the sign-up page.

Projects for this year’s hackathon include:

• getting the GCMS of the Biolab to work
• a hypha CMS programming sprint
• creating an open video conferencing box
• creating the food of the future in the foodlab
• how can the Fablab be used better?
• creating a board game

Koppelting is a continuation of the FabFuse unconferences that took place from 2012 to 2015. During these years the scope widened from fablab-oriented topics to grassroots organisation, open knowledge and peer production. For more info on the previous conferences, including extensive video registration of the talks, see the archive page.

The post Koppelting: the great gathering of the commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.