What the US can learn from Europe’s open source technology policy study

Technology and innovation have long been known to be key drivers of growth allowing companies and countries to better compete. The recent US infrastructure bill aims to foster such growth by providing for investments in digital infrastructure. However, these investments are nearly exclusively focused on better and more accessible broadband. Complementary to broadband, open technologies—those for which the underlying intellectual property, whether it is source code or hardware design, is publicly available—are playing an increasingly important role in the modern economy and companies’ and countries’ ability to innovate. The European Commission, the governing body of the European Union, commissioned a report to measure the importance of open source software (OSS) and open source hardware (OSH) for competitiveness, innovation, and technological independence in the European Union. The "Impact of Open Source Software and Hardware on Technological Independence, Competitiveness, and Innovation in the EU Economy" report, released in early September 2021, contains a wealth of information useful for understanding the importance of the open technologies that underlie the modern economy. Many of these insights can be applied to the United States, although differences between the US and EU environments limit the applicability of some of the report’s findings. Therefore, it is important to take a deeper look at the recommendations of the EU report to see how they might be applied in the US.

[Frank Nagle is an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School]