Open Community Manufacturing – Development Challenge as a Concept for Value Creation for Sustainable Manufacturing in South Africa

Abstract

Sustainable manufacturing pursues various approaches, one of them is value creation through social innovations from open source innovations, respectively open design strategies. Well-known names such as “Local Motors” are a prime example for its success. But there are also concepts, which limit the sustainability of this success and can, consequently, lead to failure. Thus, it requires more than an analysis of successful projects to discover successful approaches. The reasons for the failure of other approaches are crucial. Based on the principle of “Survivorship Bias”, success is more visible than failure. This inevitably leads to an overestimation of the prospects of success. For this purpose, different concepts were analyzed and a concept of Open Community Manufacturing – Development Challenge was created. This paper aims to describe the challenges and potentials of open source innovation and wants to present the concept based on an open design strategy, using the example of South Africa.