Yesterday I returned from a really cool two-day research seminar of our chair at ETHZ. We discussed a lot about the future research topics of our team and defined the following areas:
1. Knowledge reuse (current project about Debian source package repository)
2. Knowledge creation (see “Enabling Knowledge Creation” of 2000)
3. Communal/open innovation (distribution, participation, process, transformation)
4. User Innovation (recent trends in internet communities etc.)
5. Forking (comparing oss communities to firm processes)
6. Realm of validity of the private-collective innovation model (see paper Open Source Software and the “Private-Collective” Innovation Model)
So by reflecting about these six research areas our focus is clearly set towards basic research rather than applied science, as stated also on our research summary on the chair’s website.