Our study uncovers the main norms relative to commercialisation in a specific open source hardware community: the 3D printing community 'RepRap'. Our findings make important contributions to the literature by contending that commercialisation norms allow open source communities to benefit from commercialisation while reducing the risk that the household innovators contributing to these communities refrain from freely sharing their innovations. This is a key finding because household innovators, as well as traditional producers, more and more build on open source communities freely shared content to commercialise and diffuse novel products. Overall, our study demonstrates the commercialisation of household innovations as both an indisputable phenomenon and as beneficial when properly monitored rather than as an anomaly in a world where commercialisation would be the exclusive domain of producers.
