The day before the Paris Open Source Summit, on November 15th 2016 in Paris, FabMob will organize the first workshop on Open Hardware in the field of transportation and mobility. You are engaged in FabMob, you have an open source project, don’t hesitate to register with this LINK !

Open innovation and the automotive industry

The automotive history has always been linked to patents and industrial protection. For years, the innovation has been measured by the number of patent applications. At the same time, has grown up the cross-company cooperation as a strategic partnership to share vehicle platforms, engines or gearboxes and, in doing so, increase the volume of production and cut transactions costs. Subcontractors also have a key role to play among vehicle manufacturers. They foster sharing and pooling of component and even of sub-assemblies in their entirety. Research projects has been conducted by several manufacturers on some upstream matters, as an example the research on new combustion process. Cooperation is thus not new and a large number of alliance are actually forming visible or discreet links between these actors.

Recently some car manufacturers opened their patents in order to attract new actors onto their technology with the aim of ensuring minimal volume and then offering an acceptable price. This being the case of Toyota on hydrogen patents and Tesla on electric one. Production volumes are at the heart of effective strategies so that the automotive industry could be defined this way : “space science technology to the price of household equipment”. All the cooperation schemes are based on the decrease of the cost of obtaining upstream scientific knowledge or reaching volumes which could ensure standardization of the process. These schemes are build “with full background knowledge of the situation”.

Open innovation, as we envision it here, and open source have an another way to proceed. It’s about opening up knowledge without knowing where and how far that will take us. Open source includes all the advantages cited previously, but goes further, as this means that nothing has already been written and everything has to be built and invented.

A question of aligning creative forces

It can therefore be said that an alignment is possible between industrial interests who wants to use open source resources to pursue their strategy and collective goals willing to exploit these new resources. La Fabrique aims to investigate and explore these alignments to foster the emergence, the referencing, the development, the protection and the access to commons in the field of sustainable mobility.

To deal with the digital platforms of the GAFA, European industries of the automotive sector and more broadly of the transport field cannot ignore the strategies which are passing through the Open source and the commons. Our major competitor is time. Coopetition using open source can be the fastest way to produce a new shared culture of innovation and a credible & desirable vision of our future.

Nov 15th workshop on Open Hardware

Many projects will be presented : general overview, documentations, lessons learns, next steps.

• Ampool (http://ampool.fr ) ,
• Welo.io (http://www.welo.io )
• France Craft (http://www.francecraft.fr/ ) linked with Garage Libre initiative
• La Fonderie Car (Gael Musquet)
• Local Motors (https://localmotors.com/localmotors/the-awesome-system-driverless-mobility-on-demand/activity/ )
• Faraday Motion (http://faradaymotion.com ), with Sune Pedersen, see post on FabMob blog about this project
• Logistic Open Source (based on Renault Twizy), Connexion with existing startups working on delivery chain, on open hardware, on standard box for logistic
• Thomas Cocirta : http://mobotiq.com
• Programmable RF hacking tool controlled by your smartphone http://gollumrf.com/

We aim to identify best practises in terms of licenses, how to share, how to build community.

• Open questions :
  • do we need to federate theses projects with an open hardware database ? with regular meetings ?
  • how to share at european level ? how to build european community ? example of : http://mangoh.io/
  • how to deliver products ?
  • Identification of common needs of theses projects, what can be mutualised and co-create ?
  • how can we increase chances of success of theses projects ?
• How can we connect open hardware and others stakeholders :
  • Automotive professional (garage, car rental, …)
  • Schools for education,
  • OEM, suppliers for open innovation,
  • “Open” Cities as a partner to help implementation,
• Next step – White paper on Open Data, soft and Hardware in Mobility.

Find below our wiki, and use this link for registration !

http://wiki.lafabriquedesmobilites.fr/wiki/Inscription_Atelier_N%C2%B01_Open_Hardware