The recent patent upsurge in almost all countries and all domains has, paradoxically, contributed to draw the attention of scholars on the importance of openness and large scale collaboration for innovations’ development. The free-libre open source movement in the software industry has also contributed to put the notion of openness and decentralized problem solving in the forefront. Among others, it has led some recent works to explore how to expand the open source model in other industries. Similarly, organisation sciences have seen the emergence of the “open innovation” paradigm, which advises firms to open up their boundaries. Practices of crowdsourcing” also rely to some extent on an open and distributed model.

All these recent changes show clearly that openness, data sharing, informal collaborations, decentralised and distributed problem solving, are important elements of the innovation process. Yet, except in software, where a tremendous number of studies have been realised, we know little about open source innovation and their industrial and commercial exploitation. Only a few attempts have been made to explain how to transform open source innovation into a successful business model for a wide range of industries.