Group items tagged

what if people saw the patents

aying dormant

new ways that we can incorporate these patents into new products?"

Marblar also obtained access to many patents from the University of Pennsylvania and from ETRI,

The site also partnered with Samsung,

or its potential to bring the patents of Marblar users to life.

Any idea that Samsung likes could find its way into Samsung technology, with 10 percent of the royalties going to the Marblar users who brought it to life

The contributors to a Marblar project might be helping an inventor out of the goodness of their heart, but they also stand to gain if a particular product gets the green light. Marblar rewards users who provide useful data or information by giving them "marbles," the websites namesake currency.

In the spirit of crowdsourcing, other Marblar users can help out a particular inventor whose idea they want to see come to life.

"As you submit product ideas and contribute market data or technical data, you get more marbles," Perez said.

The more marbles a person earns, the bigger the cut he or she gets in the royalty check if the product makes it to market.

Another website, Quirky

have a store dedicated to selling its users products

patents have become more associated with litigation than productivity.

"Patent trolls buy up patents to extract money, with no intention of actually creating a product," he said. "Marblar is like the anti-troll. We're looking for new ways to commercialize."

Yet by 2007 the product was such a failure that Michelin had to abandon it.

The company hadn’t confronted the entire ecosystem the tire would rely on

conversion costs

expensive new equipment

legal challenges

Mastery of the ecosystem is the great strength that made Apple the supreme success story of our time,

The iPod

a beginning ecosystem that Jobs enlarged by introducing the iTunes Music Store.

the ecosystem further by opening up the Mac-only device to PC users.

In a world where mobile phone makers sold their devices to operators to sell to consumers, Jobs had such a powerful ecosystem that he could get operators to compete to partner with him: “And here was Apple, offering not just exclusive access to the most talked-about phone in history, but also exclusive access to Apple consumers—the most desirable customer segment imaginable

How do you take the measure of the ecosystem that your innovation will need to be part of and rely on? How do you not miss the blind spots that can lurk almost anywhere?

three main steps to take.

There are terrible pitfalls in the usual progression from prototype to pilot to rollout. It relies perilously on getting everything right from the very start. Often a far wiser and safer approach can be what Adner calls a “minimum viable footprint (MVF) rollout followed by a staged expansion.” In other words, start with a complete ecosystem, but a limited one.

hardware hacking community

overviews of Open Hardware can be found on Make Magazine’s Blog, MIT Technology Review, Computerworld, O’Reilly Radar.

Lists of existing Open Hardware projects can be found on the GOpen Hardware 2009 website, on the P2P Foundation website (here and here), on Make Magazine’s Blog, Open Innovation Projects and Open Knowledge Foundation.

4 possible levels of Openness in Open Hardware projects,

by SparkFun Electronics (USA)

Open Interface

Open Design

Open Implementation

Arduino

most popular Open Hardware project

open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software

ommercially produced

Most of Arduino official boards are manufactured by SmartProjects in Italy.

Arduino brand name

Gravitech (USA).

starting point

Closed

ecosystem

community

mature and simple

Creative Commons license

produce

redesign

sell boards

you just have to credit the original Arduino group and use the same CC license

without paying a license fee or even ask permission

the name Arduino

is trademarked

cheap and durable enough

two different business model

sharing open hardware to sell expertise, knowledge and custom services and projects around it;

hardware is becoming a commodity

selling the hardware but trying to keep ahead of competition with better products

companies that are selling open source hardware

the open source hardware community to reach $ 1 billion by 2015