Time as a service: White rabbit at CerN

While pushing forward the boundaries of human understanding of the fundamental structure of the Universe, scientists and engineers at CERN also contributed to innovation above and beyond their immediate scientific mission by developing White Rabbit (WR): an open scientific hardware that mitigates the problem of time delays in CERN's geographically distributed network. In a context of basic research and a deliberate decision to openly share the R&D process with no IP restrictions, WR is now commercialized in a diverse range of sectors beyond the scientific industry. We follow the emergence, development, and exploitation of WR to a) identify the antecedents in which capital-intensive open source hardware differ from open source software, b) to capture the mechanisms employed by CERN to stimulate firms' R&D revelation and WR collaborative development, and c) to investigate the business model configurations that companies adopted in the commercial evolution of WR.