The public transport sector is mostly a traditional sector with an oligopolistic market situation for system solutions for travel planning and ticketing. The lock-in and dependency to few system vendors in Europe stifles innovation and impedes initiatives to make public transport more attractive. But in the Nordic countries, public transport agencies (PTA) choose an alternative path to overcome system vendor dependency through open source and by engaging in community development. Our qualitative study interviewed 13 persons from 5 different PTAs in the Nordics entails an alternative pathway where they digitally disrupted the regional or national public transport market. They choose to utilise open source for central components and engage in community development to achieve political ambitions to make public transportation an attractive alternative to car travelling.

Our study presents a model on how organisations can co-evolve with the open source community through long-term engagement to access state-of-the-art digital technology and foster innovation. The model depicts a cumulative process that yields better opportunities the longer and deeper the engagement becomes. This enables digital transformation outcomes such as access to a global pool of knowledge, agile and adaptive value-creation, open innovations processes, partnership and synergy opportunities. The talk will present the findings from the study and how the model can be used as a tool to better understand and depicts the organisational alignment process, the inner mechanism and the possible transformative outcome of engaging in open source community development. Our findings demonstrate that also large traditional organisation within the transport sector can partially foster digital transformation capabilities through departmental engagement in community development which can radiate to other parts of the organisation. This entails alternative pathways for traditional organisation that are under demand to digitally transform. But this requires sustained resource investment and loyalty to community objectives to gain influence and trust, to access deeper collaboration and innovation opportunities. The talk will discuss both obstacles, possibilities and strategies that organisations can adopt when engaging in open source community development.