ZOOOM identified several companies that served as case studies for analysing best practices, challenges, and risks relating to the use of the 3Os for business purposes. These companies have been selected through two separate processes: the first category consists of a literature review, which allowed us to single out companies that are often cited across various areas of management and legal studies; in the second category, we navigated the networks of ZOOOM partners, the open web and the social networks (e.g., LinkedIn) to find out about companies based in the EU area whose activities are related to the 3Os.

In the case studies selection process for both categories of cases we paid special attention to those companies related to the four emerging technologies chosen by the ZOOOM project, i.e., AI, Blockchain, Quantum, and Robotics. Although the selection process took into account all the verticals equally, most cases revolve around the use of AI and Blockchain technologies. Quantum and Robotics are unfortunately underrepresented, which is likely owing to the highly innovative character of these technologies in the EU, potentially large orientation towards open hardware, and a delay in the academic literature production relating to such areas.

As for primary data, we conducted in-depth interviews with 25 companies of the second category, investigating aspects such as: the role of open assets in the company’s activities and value creation/capture; the company’s approach to IP management issues; the motivations for the adoption of/contribution to open assets; challenges, risks, and opportunities enabled by the engagement in open technologies; the role of the company in their market and ecosystem.

The following cases were identified as the most relevant from the academic and professional literature reviews, with respect to business and ecosystem aspects relating to the 3Os. The cases have been categorised according to their involvement in the 3Os: free and open source software (OSS), open data (OD), and open hardware (OH).

Companies such as RedHat, SpikeSource, and OpenOSX have been analysed by Watson et al. (2008) to describe the Corporate Distribution model of software production or distribution. Here, similarly to an Open Community model, the development and support of software is volunteered with limited or no commercial interest; however, in the corporate distribution model, firms create and capture value by identifying best-of-breed OSS projects, improving distribution methods for these products, and providing complementary services in order to make these OSS products more accessible to a broader market. Additionally, CentOS, LibreOffice, Nextcloud and OW2 are cases encompassing aspects relating to end user applications in connection with open-source software (Blind et al. 2021).

CentOS and Yocto are projects that enable building customized software platforms for hardware. Firstly, both cases unveil the interlinks of embedded systems to the underlying layers of Red Hat and Linux. Secondly, these cases also demonstrate the possibilities that come when open-source software and open hardware are combined (Blind et al. 2021).

IBM is another case analysed by Watson et al (2008), a high-profile corporation that contributes to developing OSS projects on the Apache’s Web server. IBM embraces the so-called Sponsored Open Source model, where OSS projects are initiated by corporations releasing previously closed codes and encouraging their employees to continue to work on the now open project – Eclipse is an example of an integrated software development environment released as OSS by IBM.

MySQL, Cendio, Roxen, and SOT have been analysed by Dahlander & Magnusson (2008) to describe three means by which firms exploit communities: (1) accessing communities to extend the resource base; (2) aligning firm strategies with the community; and (3) assimilating communities in order to integrate and share results. These cases illustrate how firms found it necessary to change their business models to align with the communities. MySQL needed to build a sufficiently large community and engage actively with the community to create a virtuous development cycle. Cendio used an adaptive approach, and did not try to change the direction of the development in the communities in any substantial way, but instead focused on using what was developed in the communities and integrating this work with internally developed components. Both Roxen and SOT founded a community but then had issues with attracting new members; SOT  tried to influence community developments by offering incentives to individuals to work with the community, to enhance both its and the firm’s reputation, and give the firm more scope for controlling the direction of community developments. For community aspects, the cases Yocto and Software Heritage are also of relevance (See Blind, Knut et al. 2021).

Arduino is an example of a success case on OH, and of a maker community that has evolved into viable business and an international benchmark. The design of the hardware is open for commercial and non-commercial purposes and the business value is based on trademark, sale of physical products, consultancy and even SaaS-type of business (Blind et al. 2021).

Makerbot, Prusa, and Ultimaker are compared with each other by Viseur & Jullien (2022), who identified two types of business models in the context of OH: Closed Supply-chain Platform and Open Industry platform.

Makerbot belongs to the first type, which consists of taking control of all the components of a product in order to master its architectures, and therefore favours a closed approach to innovation in order to guarantee the technological consistency of its platform. This involves a razor-blade type business model that relies on the sale of raw materials but requires strong control over the overall quality of the proposed solutions (the assembly of components), and also over the compatibility between the different elements of the hardware. As a result, the community is excluded from hardware developments. This strategy broadly follows the classic pattern identified in the open-source sector, or the more general framework of open innovation, where the community is exploited temporarily at the launch of the activity, to compensate for the lack of resources of the company, with a gradual closure of the development process, because the company is no longer able to capture the value created by the community. The company then develops (contractual) collaborations with suppliers or its own unitary technologies that guarantee it total control over the innovative solutions it proposes.

By contrast, Prusa Research and Ultimaker belong to the second type, embracing a particular form of innovation ambidexterity where the companies have developed their capacities to make both incremental innovation and to explore new offers. Then, Ultimaker has even abandoned the open-hardware strategy, while Prusa’s open-hardware strategy remains important for it to maintain exploratory capacities. The publication of machine specifications under a free license is necessary to generate contributions, but also to allow users to test configurations and thus report bugs. in contrast to the Makerbot’s approach, Open Industry platform strategy does not harm value capture, because the main source of revenue does not come from selling machines to its user-developers, but from printing solutions, for which the company possesses other specific human assets (business experts or experts in 3D technology), which are also expensive to replicate.

Cases White Rabbit (CERN), MyriadRF and RepRap elucidate the role of enabling technologies and Open Compute Project (FB) and SiFive (RISC-V) the role of computing, both within the context of open hardware (Blind et al. 2021).

Facebook (Meta) and Google are examples of companies that have been able to leverage OD to target campaigns with unprecedented precision, especially through a combination of data of different type (Temiz et al. 2022). These are exceptional cases, in the area of OD, due to the difficulty of capturing value from data. Indeed, enterprises face remarkable challenges in order to find, access, and select OD (Enders et al 2021; Kamariotou and Kitsiosis 2022; Krasikov et al. 2020; Monino 2021). For example, the data must not only be open, but also useful, useable, cleaned, and technically and legally accessible, and it must be matched by investments in information, metadata, software, quality management, and social tools that can cultivate the ecosystem around the open data, in addition to data analytics capabilities.

Case OW2 focuses on infrastructure software, case Software Heritage is meant for preserving software source code, case White Rabbit is a fully deterministic Ethernet-based network and case X-Road manages access to sensitive data. All these cases enlighten aspects that relate to open-source software in the public sector and connections of open source software with data (Blind et al. 2021).

Cases ESS-CDL, RoDL and JobTech shed light on emerging open data ecosystems (See Runeson et al. 2021) and open innovation. These cases are compared against the case of OpenStreetMap as a community-driven, truly open data ecosystem. The case studies observes the differences between shared data and open data and highlights the components of open data ecosystems and the need for them to be value-driven.