3D printer builders' Open-hardware strategies.

This article studies open-source 3D printer manufacturers' business models, as well as the strategies into which these models fit. To do so, we use the concepts of business model innovation and specific capabilities. The analysis of the particularities of the projects and of the associated companies reveals two "pure" open-hardware strategies, the first one based on the temporary exploitation of the free/libre/open hardware community as a complementary resources, the second one based on the construction of a sustainable collaborative activity in order to maintain dynamic capabilities that are hard to imitate.