Manufacturing is now following publishing into a democratised model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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It’s become literally child’s play to make things on your desktop, on gear with a low four-figure cost. Also,\u00a0it’s now possible to download a free design app to your phone, design a physical thing… and have a robot factory in China manufacture it in bulk and send it to you.\u00a0Some of them take PayPal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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We can print not only in metal, wood and plastic, but in biology and electronics.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Chris Anderson’s story is that, as editor of Wired<\/em>, he was given two things to review: a Lego Mindstorms robot and a model plane. When he took them home at the weekend, his kids weren’t impressed with either one separately, so they and he mashed them together and made a drone with a robot autopilot in an afternoon. That gave him a “What just happened?” moment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n He started a hobbyist website called DIYDrones, and ended up starting a business when people asked for kits. He hired a new high school graduate in Tijuana, who he’d met on the Internet, to assemble his kits when his kids wouldn’t do it any more, and discovered (when his 19-year-old employee did it and then told him about it) that you can buy factory equipment on eBay, out of cash flow, if your product’s something people want.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now he does it a bit more professionally,\u00a0and his company makes more drones than the whole of the US aerospace industry (because they’re cheap, consumer-level gear). They’re more advanced than military drones – because the users are less advanced. They’re kids and untrained hobbyists. The innovation has shifted to the low end of the market, where people want to get magic at the press of a button without worrying about the technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n He follows an “open innovation” model, on the Bill Joy principle of “the smartest people are not working for you” – wanting to get the smartest people working for him, just not necessarily employed by him. His software, and a lot of his hardware design, is open sourced. Customers become support for each other. The community finds new use cases, which contributes to the spread of the technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n By recognising contributions to the project, he builds a funnel of contributors, many of whom end up working for him full-time. The platform for innovation attracts talent to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Production, he says, has moved from an industrial act to a technological act to a social act.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=i03GLcn_ceE&feature=share<\/a><\/p>\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Manufacturing is now following publishing into a democratised model.
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