Hi Averill,
Really great to have you here 
There are other people here who will have great responses to your questions, but I am gonna try to give a few of my answers.
1) How do we convince a business to transparently collaborate and share a design or business model with the community? What is their motivation for doing so.
It is in the interest of companies to develop transparent collaboration for a few reasons:
-
Open Innovation leads to cheaper products because the cost to development decreases exponentially (no patents, people chime in with their own improvements)
-
Open innovation is always faster and more secure than closed innovation, just by the simple fact that more people have access to it and can adapt it to their own needs.
-
Being the first person/company to share an innovation in the open automatically positions you as the go-to guy, with the reputation that goes with it. This rule works as long as you build a community of contributors and deliver a quality product
-
It is easier to access the best talent in the world, since people from all over the world can access an Open Source project
-
Not everyone can compete with a company even if it is Open Source and you can copy it. To build a successful company you also need the processes, the machinery and the talent to produce and market a product
-
Besides, copycats of Open Source projects have had a beneficial effect on companies, even when they had the means to produce at the same speed and at a lower price. Normally lower price also means lower quality. This allows more people to afford the copycats copy, which leads to creating a bigger awareness, market and ecosystem to a new innovation. Once the cheaper products fails or breaks, consumers usually go to the player who has the best reputation (meaning the original creator). Some examples of this are Arduino, OpenRov, OpenDesk, Sparkfun, OSVehicle, Tesla…
-
This phenomenon has happened with the Internet which was invented in '93 and thanks to Open Source is has become the massive market it is today. 3D printers were invented before the Internet, but because of patents it took 20 extra years to become a relevant industry. From the moment the first Open Source 3D printers appeared, the market exploded with new applications and created opportunities for all sorts of markets and industries,
Technology by itself means nothing if you don’t have a list of customers, and vice-versa. Big companies already have a reputation, a customer base and experience in their craft, so it seems logical that they could only benefit from opening their projects and getting access to the innovations that people outside of their companies can develop on top of them.
I made an article on this that I think can complete these points pretty well.
In summary, communities of contributors are a better protection than patents, which are just papers that cost a lot of money and only give you the right to sue some other company.
Open Source, is generally a win-win for everyone, while patents are generally a win-lose situation, or even lose-lose when companies decide to sue each other over similar inventions.
2). What has digital open sourcing (the success of Linux) taught us about its application to the wider business model/profit making context.
Regarding business models, software and hardware are pretty different businesses and games altogether. Software is pretty easy to produce, copy and distribute, while hardware involves stocking materials, processing and moving them around.
The main lesson that has emerged from the Open Hardware movement is: “To make something profitable you just have to sell it for more than it costs” - Chris Anderson
To illustrate how this looks in practical terms Lars Zimmermann (@Lars2i), Mathilde Berchon and Benjamin Tincq have made an amazing work documenting the business models that exist for hardware here. here and here respectively.
Creative Commons also recently made an amazing article on this with some hardware use cases.
Hope I haven’t flooded you with too much information. Let me know if something is not very clear or if you have any question. Would be glad to go deeper into the subject