Wertschöpfungsbeitrag offener Werkstätten

So called open workshops or Makerspaces represent a concept for sustainable value creation that is pursued worldwide. They offer open access for civil society protagonists to participate in collaborative value creation processes, to acquire technical production competencies and to carry out value creation processes independently. By providing a production-technical and social infrastructures, they offer the potential to promote technical and social innovations. This dissertation attempts to demonstrate the benefits of open workshops for the user, academic education and society, and to identify opportunities for how open workshops can contribute to promote the goal of transformative change towards sustainable societies and economies. A model is developed that outlines the development opportunities of open workshops, identifies the individual, societal, economic and ecological benefits and thereby describes their potentials for transformative change. Open workshops are analyzed in the process of democratizing knowledge and technology. Development options with transformative potential are described in more detail using the exemplary application of a university makerspace.