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Professor Roland Jochem from the Technische Universität Berlin is coordinating the European research and innovation project OPENNEXT, a project that is enabling small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) across Europe to engage in communities with consumers and makers, in order to fundamentally change how products are designed, produced, and distributed. Product creation is inaccessible to most people, but open source hardware (OSH) product designs are available for anyone to modify, make, distribute and sell. OSH offers enormous potential for restructuring the social organisation of product development and reforming conventional industrial practice. This joint participation can bring benefits to both SMEs and consumers. OPENNEXT thus facilitates collaborative product creation by companies and communities of consumers and makers through new mindsets, new business models, and new collaborative software solutions.
