2021-06-23 –, Auditorium
In 2020, a study was commissioned by the European Commission’s DG CONNECT to analyse the economic impact of Open Source Software (OSS) and Hardware (OSH) on the European economy.
It is estimated that companies located in the European Union (EU) invested around €1 billion in OSS in 2018, resulting in an impact on the European economy between €65 and €95 billion. The analysis estimates a cost-benefit ratio of above 1:4 and predicts that an increase of 10% of OSS contributions generates around additional 0.4% to 0.6% GDP per year as well as more than 600 additional ICT start-ups per year in the EU. Case studies revealed that the public sector could not only reduce the total cost of ownership by procuring OSS instead of proprietary software, but more importantly avoid vendor lock-in, thus increasing its digital autonomy.
However, the scale of Europe’s institutional capacity related to OSS is disproportionately smaller than the scale of the value created by OSS. The study therefore recommends a number of specific public policy recommendations aimed at achieving a digitally autonomous public sector, open R&D enabling European growth and a digitised and internally competitive industry.
to come
Prof. Knut Blind was a senior researcher and departmental head at Fraunhofer ISI between 1996 and 2010, before returning to ISI in October 2019 as the coordinator of the Business Unit Regulation and Innovation. Between 2010 and 2019, he worked in the Innovation Management Department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems as a project manager. Since 2006, he is also Professor for Innovation Economics at the Technical University Berlin. Between 2008 and 2016, he also held the Endowed Chair in Standardization at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
His research focus is on analyzing the connection between regulation and innovation. Specifically, on the one hand, he deals with the impacts of regulatory framework conditions on the innovation behavior of companies, which he explores on both a macroeconomic and microeconomic level. On the other hand, he analyzes standardization as a form of self-regulation in formal institutions, but also in consortia as a technology transfer channel in the context of research and development, and in the context of public procurement, cluster promotion and state regulation as other instruments of innovation policy. Another research focus is on intellectual property rights, from patents to open source licenses. His publications are generally based on econometric analyses of economic statistics and other indicators, some of which he developed himself, but also on survey data. They are listed here. He was elected a member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) in 2017 due to his scientific achievements