Open hardware as an experimental innovation platform: preliminary research questions and findings

In this article, we explore the concept of Open Hardware (OH) as an experimental innovation platform to take a first step in the study of the institutional and sociotechnical conditions for fostering and advancing Free and Open Source projects at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN. For our purposes, OH will be described as a highly adaptable platform for present and future research infrastructures. As part of the contemporary movement for “Open Science,” OH will be examined with respect to its actual and potential contributions to the development of common tools and infrastructures for large-scale scientific collaborations. The primary data we use was gathered by the CERN Knowledge Transfer group in October 2016 through an online survey in addition to face-to-face interviews. Our preliminary findings point to the need for establishing different modes of institutional support beyond CERN and outside the hobbyist market to help advance cultures of collaborative hardware development in the sciences.