Zhang Yuming is a Level-2 professor and doctoral supervisor of the Department of Accounting of the School of Management, Shandong University, selected as a chief expert of the Major Program of the National Social Science Fund of China(twice), an academic board member of the Research Center for Technological Innovation, Tsinghua University, and an editor or editorial board member of Management World, British Accounting Review, etc. His research interests include corporate finance and intelligent accounting, sharing economy and SMEs growth, innovation and management of science and technology, etc. He has published 22 monographs, among which Sharing Economics was selected for the Chinese Academic Translation Project of the National Social Science Foundation of China (2018). He has published more than 200 papers in Accounting Research, and two of them have been selected as the world’s top 1% ESI highly cited papers. He has won the third prize of the Ministry of Education, the Shandong Social Science Major Achievement Award, and other awards more than 10 times. Besides, he is also a think tank decision-making consultant of Shandong Province, a member of the Shandong Big Data Research Association, and the first president of the Digital Intelligent Accounting and Finance Branch of the Association.
On June 17th, the SMEs Branch of the Chinese Society of Technology Economics held a symposium on “High-quality Development of SMEs in the Background of New Industrialization” in Hangzhou. Professor Zhang Yuming delivered a keynote speech entitled “Open Source Innovation and the Development of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises(SMEs)”.
The innovation and development of SMEs cannot be separated from the support of technologies, talents, information, creativity, knowledge, skills, wisdom, data, capital, facilities, production capacity, supply chain, and other factors. However, in the conditions of a traditional market economy, these resources are limited, and the scarcity of resources leads to high prices, whereas many SMEs are unable to bear or break through the constraints of the resources, thus resulting in development troubles and difficulties. How can they acquire and utilize those resources in a low-cost, high-efficiency, all-factor, all-process, and all-round way to break through the resource constraints of development? Open source innovation offers a feasible path.
Nowadays, software defines(eats) the world, and open source is eating software. Open source has become a global development consensus. On July 28th, 2022, Mei Hong, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said at the Openatom Global Opensource Summit that open innovation has become the mainstream of the time. He said, “Open source has formed the amazing innovation ability of the open source community through popular collaboration, and the massive software resources in open source community have realized open sharing. Meanwhile, the frequent updates of the open source community realize the continuous evolution of the open source community.” Ni Guangnan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, also called for embracing open source. The global opensource ecosystem has basically taken shape. Today, some of the underlying technologies necessary for the rise of cloud computing, big data, and AI cannot be separated from open source. Without open source, there may not be cloud computing, big data, AI, mobile Internet, and the rapid rise and popularization of autonomous driving technology(Cui Baoqiu, 2021).
Leading enterprises in technology and world-class companies are all using open source. Huawei has developed EdgeGallery, MindSpore, Karmada, openEuler, openGauss, and OpenHarmony; Baidu has opened PaddlePaddle deep learning platform and Apollo autonomous driving platform; Haier has built the industrial APP development framework of COSMOPlat industrial Internet platform with open source; Alibaba has developed Alibaba Cloud and RocketMQ mass information middleware with open source; Sensetime has built OpenMMLab Open Algorithm for Computer Vision and matrix element Rosetta privacy Al open source framework; JD has built JD Chain open source blockchain, etc. In the auto industry, companies including BYD, NIO, Shanghai GM/SAIC, Geely, and GWM have actively participated in open source and have infused a strong impetus into the rise of China’s new energy vehicle industry. In recent years, some innovators, entrepreneurs, and micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises have also begun to actively use open source and have achieved continuous growth.
The concept of open source is no longer limited to open source code. The core essence of open source is innovation, openness, freedom, sharing, collaboration, and green. The sharing economy represented by open source has become a major source of innovation and a major pattern of social collaboration. Open source also includes open source culture, open source community, open source hardware, open source technology, open source education, open source enterprise, and open source business pattern(Liu Shu, 2021). Open source innovation refers to an innovation pattern in which various innovation subjects, guided by the concept of openness, mutual benefit, and borderless collaboration, open their source code, software, data, structure, technology, platform, community, ecology, design, hardware, culture, and other forms to break through organizational boundaries, acquire external resources at low cost, and achieve efficient collaborative innovation(Zhang Yuming, 2023). Open source innovation has comprehensively applied to nearly 20 key industries of the national economy including machinery, transportation, and energy, and has become an important cornerstone for the development of each industry.
The essence of open source innovation is distributed collaborative development. The advantages of distributed collaboration are manifested in the paradigm of all-time collaboration to break through physical restrictions, all-process innovation to break resource constraints, all-factor participation to maintain the stability of the project, all-round assessment to prevent systematic risks, all-process services to escort the project cycle, and all-field empowerment to subvert the whole industry innovation. The goal of open source innovation is to achieve low-cost and high-efficient innovation. According to the 2022 China Open Source Software Industry Research Report released by iResearch, open source innovation can save 38% of direct development costs for projects. The cost of software development in enterprises respectively accounts for 13%, 13%, 41%, 23%, and 10% after being split into five parts including demand, design, construction, testing, and implementation. Rally Fighter is the world’s first car designed in open source mode by Local Motors, whose source code is available for everyone to download. The design of a new mass-produced car can be completed within 18 months, which is about four times faster than traditional car design.
Let’s actively embrace open source and look forward to the better development of SMEs with open source!
