Value-driven industry transformation: Leveraging open-source to establish new standards

Abstract

Traditional industries face growing pressure to digitally transform. In particular, established organizations must adopt new mindsets and act to remain competitive. To counter the challenges posed by monopolies and new entrants in a diverse and fiercely competitive landscape like Logistics, the Open Logistics Foundation (OLF) plays a pivotal role. It aims at fostering the development of logistics-specific open-source-software (OSS) to establish new digital services setting industry standards and ensuring enhanced connectivity and compatibility. The OLF represents an expanding core-community of dedicated logistics organizations. This core-community collaboratively identifies, selects, and develops relevant OSS for upcoming value-serving digital services and solutions. What sets this approach apart is its departure from the traditional solution-oriented open-source model. Instead of concluding with an OSS community, it starts with a dedicated core-community aiming at setting new widely adopted standards. However, even with this standard-driven approach, designing the right solution can be as challenging as finding a unicorn. To enhance the likelihood of success, this paper designed and evaluated the Minimum Viable core-Community driven Open-Source method (MV-COS). The MV-COS offers a comprehensive and standardized support allowing to holistically craft the vision, stakeholder-specific value propositions, and the corresponding implementation strategy of OSS projects. It prioritizes the early design and assessment of its likelihood to attract and align a critical mass of users which is the fundamental requirement for establishing new de-facto standards. The MV-COS enables to fail fast and iterate early, avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of resources.