This paper contributes to the literature on open source by providing a quan-titative study (N = 76) of open design projects. Extensive research has been done to analyze the phenomenon of open source software from different per-spectives, however very little research has been done with reference to open source development of tangible objects, so-called open design, so far. Until recently, limitations to the availability of successful empirical examples of this ‘new innovation model ’ outside software may have been a key reason for this gap. Our goal is to develop an empirically founded perspective on those projects and to understand their contextual background. Along a framework describing open source innovation we first show uni-variate statistical analyses to explore the variety of projects. We find that actors stem from different backgrounds and that projects vary considerably in terms of community size, complexity of the objects being developed, and in-novativeness of the intended outcomes. We also observe different approaches towards the protection of intellectual property and the responsibility for de-velopment and production processes. Bivariate analysis can partly explain the relations between project ad-vancement and project characteristics. Open source development seems fea-sible for tangible products under a variety of different circumstances. How-ever we identify some attributes favoring high stages of advancement among projects. Our results are partly in line with large-scale empirical studies on open source software, but we also point to potential discrepancies between open development of software and physical products.