It is government subsidies, especially from the United States government and the Department of Defense, that give us modern technology. This tradition informed what we expect of technology as a public good, free and beneficial to all, but innovation has become much more complex. Private companies and open-source communities have become the technological powerhouses of the day: who will be held responsible for building tomorrow’s technologies?

The answer is not simple and clear, because every stakeholder has different strengths and difficulties. Governments with the resources and foresight to invest in basic research, some of which may not make a profit right now, but will deliver societal good. Private companies, subject to the demands and recompenses of the marketplace, can be great at developing new products as fast as possible for the masses and refining them as the market demands. In contrast, open-source communities offer a collaborative, open, and accessibility-focused technology for people. All of these organizations have a place in technology innovation, but to be driven by one would kill innovation in ways we don’t anticipate.

Government subsidies, of course, have long allowed for the big innovations that helped to establish modern technology infrastructure. And even the internet started as ARPANET, an experiment from the US Department of Defense to build a secure, distributed communication network. The government has often carried out the early research because they are willing to take on high-risk, long-term projects that corporations might refuse to take on because of the unsure returns. Government loans made possible GPS, MRI machines, even some early smartphone parts – all of which ushered in the change of life.

But governments are good at risky foundational research, but have trouble being agile and commoditised. Congestion in bureaucracies, funding pressures, political changes all can impede or halt promising projects. Here’s where private corporations have historically taken the reins. Armed with the tools and motivations to hone government-sponsored research into consumer products, Google, Apple and Amazon have taken base technologies and put them in front of consumers on a scale never before seen. But the side effects of corporate innovation can be also very real. Profit before all else can lead to choices that don’t always serve the public interest, be they privacy-related, monopolistic or ecological.

Enter open-source projects, a promising alternative by enabling technology to be open, flexible and, in many cases, free. Open source philosophy stands for openness, user participation, and shared ownership. Promising projects such as Linux, Firefox, Wikipedia and the like prove that a model that’s not so much profit driven as passionate, communal and knowledge-based is possible. The void often left by government and corporate programmes is occupied by open-source projects, solving specific problems or advocating for ethics in ways that the others do not. But open-source projects can’t scale or compete with big, pumped-up, company companies because of resource limits.

And the hope is that innovation’s future is not on the shoulders of one giant but on an ecosystem in which governments, corporations and open-source communities all act in synergy. Governments could target high-risk, long-term investments and provide a regulation system to ensure morality. Corporations could harness those discoveries into products that are offered to the public, with responsibility processes that take on public objections. Open-source communities can still be proponents of transparency, inspiring corporations and governments alike towards fairer, more moral norms.

In the end, such a balance is not only possible, but imperative to meeting the technicolour future’s challenges. Each has a distinct innovation function, and together they make a stronger ecosystem than any one could create by itself. Going forward, we must support collaboration and partnerships drawing on the strengths of governments, companies and open-source communities so that the next generation of technology is as innovative as it is inclusive.