Too often, the word ‘openness’ has been used to embrace the entire scope of policies and outcomes that characterise a healthy economy. But this makes ‘openness’ unachievable from a policy point of view. Here, I use the word to refer narrowly to an open policy stance, the opposite of protectionism. Defined this way, ‘openness’ does not, unfortunately, guarantee growth, and in some circumstances ...

The benefits of open architectures are not currently available for most manufacturing equipment. We describe a testbed for experimenting with an open architecture controller for an inspection system. An initial taxonomy of categories of openness is proposed, culminating in "plug and play," which does not require a software rebuild. The testbed and its constituent components are described with r...

........................................................................................... 4 Introduction ...................................................................................... 5 Theoretical background .................................................................. 7 Absorptive Capacity ............................................................. 9 Types of Openness ..........