This paper presents a case study on emerging challenges within collaborative innovation projects engaging open communities. Innovation driven by open communities has proven to have a significant potential, in particular for open source software. However, tools and methodologies enabling the supervision of collaborative innovation involving open communities, in the perspective of creating open hardware to solve societal issues, remains at the early stages. This paper seeks to pinpoint the potentialities and challenges of such projects toward defining methods to better support a multi-stakeholders open source collaboration context. The experimental field of this research concerns the smart electricity distribution, and more precisely a public driven project of the diffusion of smart-meters in France and their appropriation by open source communities, with the involvement of the university and a public industrial company. The project seeks to study how these communities of users develop in a collaborative manner, new products and services using the smart-meter as a support technology. The first results show that the open community makes natural connection on specific environments such as Smart buildings to materialize usages of smart meters.