Mozilla Open Innovation Project

The Open Innovation Project aims to broaden the understanding of how open source beliefs and principles can be implemented in the Global South, specifically looking at the Indian Tech Ecosystem. In doing so we seek to understand how multiple players in India are currently availing or hope to avail resources in the country that can enable certain aspects of the open source software movement. Specifically, we observe how different organisations are attempting to follow the principles of the Open Source Software (OSS) movement and the free software (FS) movement in India. We also attempt to understand how large scale public digital infrastructure and platforms affect opportunities for the OSS and FS production in the country. As highlighted in the proposal the purpose of the study is to observe whether systems that were deemed “open” are actually structurally formed keeping in mind themes of access, empowerment and opportunity. Additionally, we seek to understand the realities and experiences of different stakeholders in the sector to gauge the current state of innovation practices in the country.

Thus we first begin by defining open innovation in a manner that is contextually relevant to India. For this study we define open innovation as the creation of technology enabled tools and products contextually relevant to the users of a geographic area that follows certain principles. These could be using legislative frameworks such as Creative Commons, the open distribution of the products, and the ability for different users to update the tools to fit their needs and requirements.

We believe that this definition of open innovation is important, because geographical and cultural contexts affect the way in which innovation is promoted. Due to its geographical inception in the global north OSS and FS frameworks need to be further calibrated when looking at different countries with different access to resources, different cultural norms and different government reforms and aid. Thus we believe that with this definition we aim to create a tangent in the discourse of OSS and FS movements to ensure that geographical and cultural considerations are taken into account while looking at the concept of open source software and providing countries to aim towards open source principles and beliefs depending on the constraints observed in their immediate environment.

We also believe that innovation is an integral part of how OSS and FS movements have functioned in the past with the creation of software and tools that aim to solve a larger problem, or create a product that benefits a wide variety of stakeholders. We believe that given the heterogeneity of the population in a country like India, innovation must also include understanding the nuances of different stakeholders in the country. Unlike innovation built for a large homogenous audience with similar uses, innovation in India must also include the building of technology enabled services and tools geared towards respecting the heterogeneity of the populace. With this broad definition we aim to understand how such types of innovation practices function in the country today.

To understand the multiple nuances at play while looking at the tech ecosystem in the country, we began to observe a heterogeneous group of stakeholders who provided different perspectives in understanding the on-ground difficulties of enabling a robust open source ecosystem that reduced the digital divide in the country. We hoped to understand if there needed to be a recalibration of what must constitute open innovation for countries like India in particular, and the global south in general. Whether the original definitions and environments that enabled the movement to be successful in the global north could be reproduced in developing countries, specifically one as heterogeneous as India. Or whether there required a completely different approach to reduce the gaps enforced not only by lack of access to resources but also cultural tendencies and biases by the population affecting different social groups.