Social platform innovation of open source hardware in South Korea

•How open source hardware can be adopted.•Snowball sampling of 300 people.•Content, consumer support, user interface, and reward are important factors.•The brand reputation found insignificant.

This paper proposes the use of OSHW to successfully penetrate the Internet of Things (IoT) market by using a social platform with a new interdisciplinary perspective rather than through the use of existing technical approaches. Snowball sampling was used in this study to survey 300 people who work and have had experiences with online brand communities for open source hardware (OSHW) at Fab Lab Seoul. The findings of this study indicate that content, consumer support, user interface, and reward are among the five factors that trigger an online brand community to develop a social OSHW platform. However, this study also found that brand reputation was insignificant relative to activating a social media platform for open-source software. In addition, activating a social platform for OSHW can positively affect to the brand community’s loyalty for OSHW, which means that social platform innovation for OSHW can help form the positive attitude necessary to develop and diffuse an OSHW culture in a rapidly changing ICT ecosystem. This can be an important strategy for OSHW business and can contribute to the growth of the IoT market in South Korea.