Crosscutting open source technology applied to Wave Energy Converters

Wave energy technology developers have felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big energy companies would copy their technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm these technology developers. They could not have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: wave energy programs at the major utilities or independent power producers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 0.1% of their total research and development resources.
In the software industry, the success of open innovation strategies through open sourcing is widely known and acknowledged. The open source approach to create software innovations has become a vital alternative to in-house developments for many firms. In fact, in Open-source software projects, the major innovations come from the users, the open source community.
A new H2020 project called surging energy absorption through increasing thrust and efficiency (SEA-TITAN) aims to accelerate the advent of wave energy by opening the innovation process to the open source community by implementing an open business model, which facilitates the technology development, providing free use of patents by other competitors (wave energy technology developers), the ones who are in the project consortium or additional companies willing to join in the future.