Open production: scientific foundation for co-creative product realization

Globalization and the use of technology call for an adaptation of value creation strategies. As the potential for rationalization and achieving flexibility within companies is to the greatest possible extent exhausted, approaches to the corporate reorganization of value creation are becoming increasingly important. In this process, the spread and further development of information and communication technology often provide the basis for a reorganization of cross-company value nets and lead to a redistribution of roles and tasks between the actors involved in value creation. While cooperative, decentralized and self-organizing value creation processes are in fact being promoted, the associated potential for development and production engineering is being underestimated and hence not implemented sufficiently. This contribution will introduce a value creation taxonomy and then, using its notion and structure, describe the emerging transformations in value creation on the basis of case studies. Finally an adequate framework for analysing and configuring value creation will be presented.