Toolify: Open innovation in the tool industry

With Toolify, the industrial tool manufacturer Thürmer Tools is taking an innovative approach to creating, producing and marketing new products by establishing a ‘Spotify for tools’. The path to realising Toolify involves strategic design tools and open innovation processes.

Thürmer Tools has a vision for the future where tools are created in a new way, where the company’s clients and business partners are engaged as co-creators.

With Toolify, they have thus begun to develop a concept for a platform that makes this possible, and where users, makers, clients and suppliers make up a community that not only works together to innovate and conceive of future tools but is also enabled to produce them by means of new digital manufacturing technologies, such as 3D printing.

The concept rethinks classic concepts of ownership, such as patents and copyright issues, and instead explores knowledge sharing, open-source principles and co-creation.

As part of this process, Thürmer Tools has been involved in testing parts of the REMODEL programme in experiments with new, open business models and has thus, within the programme framework, helped pioneer the exploration of open-source principles as a path to new Internet-driven economies.

Listen to Thürmer Tools’ Head of R&D Ingeborg Rosenvinge discuss the company’s visions and their experiences so far:

Read more about Thürmer Tools here, and explore the Danish Design Centre’s effords to create more open source innovators in Danmark via the REMODEL programme.