The Intention Span of Openness

Open Innovation, Open Source, Open Education. Since the internet enabled the design of more open systems, the advantages of openness found their way into areas like economy, technology and society. Over the past decades numerous organizations and initiatives have occurred with a strong belief in open sharing, collaboration and production. They all speak about openness as a core design principle of their approaches, but often mean something fundamentally different. Economists speak about open platforms as a corporate strategy, technologists about the open development of software and educators about the open sharing of knowledge. I would argue there exists a span of openness that is characterized by intention and different degrees of openness. The concept of Open Innovation is about increasing the economic power of an organization by strategically managing the degree of openness. A well known example for Open Innovation are app stores. They are the foundation for all applications and services used on a smartphone. Which apps are available? Who can publish an app? Under which conditions can an app be published? When a system is designed in an open way the activities of the contributors increase the economic value of the system. In the conception of Open Source, openness means that everyone can freely run, study, modify and share a program, and use it in commercial and non-commercial ways. This guarantees that everyone can look at the source code to figure out how something works, improve individual development skills and ensure that a program does what it pretends to do. By having the possibility to modify and the right to share, a program can be made more useful for oneself and others. Hence, Open Source is about sharing innovation for the development of more progressive technologies across organizations. The concept of Open Education aims to fix power inequalities and wide spread educational exclusion. For that, knowledge has to be open and accessible, so that everyone has the possibility to participate in education. Openness in this context means that everyone can freely access knowledge regardless of aspects like the ability to pay or location. If knowledge is power, then Open Education intends to distribute power and therefore enable more socially equal conditions. All these concepts contain the word open, but their degree of openness is strongly coupled with the often invisible intentions behind them. As a response to the solely positive connotation of openness we might need a more differentiated labeling.

Jul 31, 2025