Makers (by Anderson)

Book: Chris Anderson. Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. 2012

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Description

"explains how today’s hobbyists and tinkerers are turning into entrepreneurs through a series of newly accessible micro-manufacturing techniques like 3-D printers and powerful prototyping tools". [1]

Wired magazine editor and bestselling author Chris Anderson takes you to the front lines of a new industrial revolution as today’s entrepreneurs, using open source design and 3-D printing, bring manufacturing to the desktop. In an age of custom-fabricated, do-it-yourself product design and creation, the collective potential of a million garage tinkerers and enthusiasts is about to be unleashed, driving a resurgence of American manufacturing. A generation of “Makers” using the Web’s innovation model will help drive the next big wave in the global economy, as the new technologies of digital design and rapid prototyping gives everyone the power to invent -- creating “the long tail of things”.

What happens when DIY meets Web 2.0? In Makers, New York Times bestselling author Chris Anderson reveals how entrepreneurs use web principles to create and produce companies with the potential to be global in scope as well as how they use significantly less in the way of financial resources, tooling, and infrastructure required by traditional manufacturing. Anderson's unique perspective is that small manufacturing will be a significant source of future growth; that the days of giant companies like General Motors are in their twilight; that in an age of open source, custom-fabricated, and do-it-yourself product design, the collective potential of a million garage tinkerers will be unleashed on global markets.[2]

Review

Martin Pasquier:

"Chris Anderson’s “Maker : the new industrial revolution” is a brilliant book, one of the kind you can’t close without DOING something. And it really matches with all my current thoughts on a community-based world (may sound familiar for US readers, it’s a new world for Europe at least, and what I experience in Asia confirms it’s a US exception). By the way, this post and a few other to come will go into a new category (after “Playing with Data” and “Going social in Asia”), say hi to “The rise of Communities”).

For Anderson, the 3rd industrial revolution (after the steam engine and the mechanization in the 18th-19th century, and the oil and transportation in the 19th-20th) is about to come thanks the web AND the way it’s changing manufacturing. Beyond the 3D printers, laser-cutters and other DIY toolkit that gives body to the Makers movement, Chris Anderson is best at showing us how these digital/physical tools are reshaping parts of our society :

• If the web has democratized innovation in bits, Makers are democratizing innovation in atoms thanks rapid prototyping and affordable tools. Welcome to “the long tail of things”

• the way makers work is based on community : it provides market research, marketing and part of the sales in exchange for symbolic rewards such as recognition or extended rights within the community (think of admin and moderators in forum or the different rewards in Kickstarter)

• if you like geo-economics, you’ll be happy to know that Makers could be a way for the West (and the US, notably) to counter cheap labor from Asia, as the value of the product goes more and more to its community, its closeness to consumer, its reliability, its shapeability.

• this revolution is also the one of the amateurs, who, after conquering social media with lolcats and biting babies, enter the physical world with customized and passionate objects. Why buy IKEA or Muji when you can order more authentic on Etsy ? That’s where the premium lies : you pay your avoidance of mass-consumption (for good !)

• this “cottage industry”, in reference to the first stages of the English Industrial Revolution, is not a competitor to the big industry, rather something that fills in for a more personalized demand in lesser quantities. It’s not (yet ?) possible to achieve economies of scale with Maker but it doesn’t cost more to produce another customized product.

• the tool itself has a liberating power : the same way the press made people express, the web had people publish, we can bet that makers tools will have people build and manufacture

• with the long tail of things come the long tail of talents, as many project offer a surface for anyone with the skills or the will to take part : “it’ the ultimate market solution : open innovation communities connect latent supply (talent not already employed in that field) with latent demand (products not already economical to create the usual way)”

If you look to Makers with the prism of community, there’s also many interesting hints in Anderson’s book :

• Making is a way to fulfill one’s own inspiration with one’s own tools, almost without any help from bi companies and the state. This is, for sure, a way for communities to develop further their own economics.

• This long tail of things or micro-markets makes us new “indie”, allowing peoples differences to express and have more value than standard mass-production items.

• The law of supply and demand is, in a way, taken the other way-round. Instead of a product wanted by a company (and sometimes checked by market research), the niche products of makers are driven by people’s wants and needs (“we might today think of manufacturing firms as linked to particular communities”)

• The Maker movement is the pinnacle of the remix culture found everywhere on the web, every one, every community is now deemed able to produce its own products (or rather : its own way of a given product)

• The way community is integrated to Makers development is quite easy : you receive market research, R&D, support, product documentation, marketing and first sales if you manage to give social incentives that will make the community more engaged in your project

• The setup of a community-centric venture is also seen in its communications and marketing : there’s a blog, not a site, and forums where people help each other. Tutorials are made by employees.

Take the example of Lego. The brick brand would not develop modern weapons, and thus be cut of 8-9 year old kids who go through their war stage. A community, Brickarms, began to mold modern weapons, and is soon recognized by Lego provided it complies with two measures (no violation of trademark and security check for items not to be eaten by little kids). It’s a complementary ecosystem : they product and sell items that would not reach enough volume for Lego to produce. They keep also quitting customers more longer.

In a nutshell, the community in the cases shown in Makers are a competitive advantage over cheap and remote labour. This is a brilliant example and story of industries driven by social interest (purpose, passion) rather than merely commercial interests." (http://martinpasquier.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/chris-andersons-makers-when-customers-turn-into-community/)

Making won't replace manufacturing

A sceptical review by David Rotman:

"What kind of future might the maker movement bring us? Anderson envisions it could mean that “Western countries like the United States regain their lost manufacturing might, but rather than with a few big industrial giants, they spawn thousands of smaller firms picking off niche markets.”

The problem with this thesis is that ­Anderson makes little effort to explain how a community of creative and enthusiastic individuals or small startups might give rise to an industrial movement capable of transforming and revitalizing manufacturing. His analyses often seem incomplete: “Because of the expertise, equipment, and costs of producing things on a large scale, manufacturing has been mostly the provenance of big companies and trained professionals. That’s about to change. Why? Because making things has gone digital: physical objects now begin as designs on screens, and those designs can be shared online as files.” The reader is left wondering: how does sharing digital designs change the fact that most of the goods we want and depend upon, from iPhones to jet planes, still require the skills and budgets of large manufacturers? Equally frustrating, Anderson often relies on shaky historical comparisons, suggesting that makers are today’s version of garage tinkerers like Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club, which spawned the Apple II in the 1970s. For the maker movement, merely sharing the principles and spirit of those renowned innovators hardly guarantees comparable success.

Anderson’s prediction that many consumers will move away from cheap mass-produced goods to the work of “industrial artisans” could someday come true. But, again, his evidence is unconvincing: “Just think of couture fashion or fine wines,” he writes. These are small markets. And for many other goods, people often prefer mass-­produced versions, because they cost less and are at least standardized, if not always great, in quality. ­Anderson suggests that “what the new manufacturing model enables is a mass market for niche products.” But he doesn’t attempt to quantify the economic impact of this shift to artisanal goods. He points to what he calls “happiness economics” rather than conventional macroeconomics as the real justification for custom production: “What’s interesting is that such hyperspecialization is not necessarily a profit-­maximizing strategy. Instead, it is better seen as meaning-­maximizing.”

Perhaps most damning for his ambitious claims about the impact of the maker movement, Anderson has little interest in how most things are actually manufactured. He locates the real value of the subculture in the creation and sharing of digital designs for stuff. Anderson is agnostic about what should happen next: send the design to your 3-D printer or upload it to the cloud and send it to a contract manufacturer in China, he suggests. While 3-D printers will no doubt get more versatile—some advanced models are already able to handle an impressive range of materials, including certain metals—additive manufacturing will remain, at least for a while, better suited to making parts than to building entire machines or devices. As a result, Anderson’s vision for his industrial revolution is too often limited to stuff that can be fabricated by a 3-D printer and laser cutter or easily assembled by a manufacturer acting as a cloud service.

This is frustrating, because the way we make things in the United States is in desperate need of revitalization. The country is still a manufacturing powerhouse, but according to some estimates, it now trails China as the world’s leading producer of goods (see “Can We Build Tomorrow’s Breakthroughs?” January/February 2012). Perhaps more troubling, it is also behind many Asian and European countries in advanced manufacturing.

In Producing Prosperity: Why America Needs a Manufacturing Renaissance, Gary P. Pisano and Willy C. Shih, professors at Harvard Business School, list critical technologies in which the United States has lost or is at risk of losing its manufacturing prowess. Among them are rechargeable batteries, liquid crystal displays, and semiconductors (70 percent of the world’s foundry capacity is in Taiwan). It is no longer feasible to make e-ink readers in this country, though the technology was invented here.

Shih rejects the notion that innovative products can reliably emerge when designs are shipped off for others to produce. Rather, he suggests, truly advanced products more typically come about when designers and inventors understand manufacturing processes. “You can create a CAD design,” he says, “but you need to understand what a production process can and can’t do.”

Many types of manufacturing require a sophisticated series of steps and processes to be done in precise sequence. Selecting the right materials and technologies is key to high-quality, low-cost results. If designers don’t understand the manufacturing processes and materials that are practical, they will never come up with the most advanced and compelling new products. It’s a lesson that has been repeatedly learned over the last decade in the development of new clean-energy technologies. Innovators may create smart designs for technologies such as solar panels, but ignoring the costs and practical details of manufacturing the new products is a sure path to failure.

It may be too much to expect that Anderson’s makers will have much impact on the manufacture of high-tech goods. But scattered within the maker movement are many clever ideas about sharing, collaborating, and creating consumer-­friendly designs that could help revitalize our thinking about how to produce things. (Consider, as a precedent, Anderson’s example of how open-source software, once dominated by communities of individual programmers, has been adopted by large companies.) One also suspects that the manufacturing sector could benefit from the entrepreneurial spirit and creative instincts of the makers Anderson profiles, as well as from the imaginative uses they’ve found for 3-D printing.

But to get anywhere near Anderson’s lofty goal of revolutionizing industry, individual makers and small startups will have to collaborate not only with each other but also with large industrial firms. And to do that, the maker movement will need to be more curious and knowledgeable about how stuff is actually made." (http://www.technologyreview.com/review/508821/the-difference-between-makers-and-manufacturers/)

Interview

Interview conducted by Business without Borders[3]:

Q: What is the new age of American manufacturing?

Anderson: Well, there are really two things going on. The first is a new generation of manufacturing tools, by and large digital fabrications, that are within reach of regular people. They’re desktop manufacturing tools like a personal computer or desktop publishing a decade ago. It’s a suite of tools and technologies that were only available to big manufacturers and factories in the past, but are now available to everybody, relatively inexpensively.

The second thing is simply that the web has created new innovation models. We get to do things together in online collaborations, give away our ideas and form ad hoc communities. We can take everything we’ve learned online over the past 20 years and apply it to the world of manufacturing and physical stuff. It will accelerate innovation much faster than 20 years ago.

Q: When you’re talking about the Maker Movement, are you talking about very small-scale manufacturing?

Anderson: It starts small scale, but it’s a progression from hobbyists and DIY to entrepreneurship, which can scale some very large companies. The first personal computers were for hobbyists, but over time we got them into everyone’s hands, created the web and ended up with the Facebooks and Twitters. It has never been easier to get big, because supply chains are now open to all. You can outsource so much of the production anywhere, so you’re able to move into mass production without going through the process of building your own factory, which is an enabler of growth that wouldn’t have been possible a generation ago.

Q: In the short term are we still dependent on outsourcing production?

Anderson: Yes and no. The desktop manufacturing tools will allow you to prototype and make things on a small scale. Then, when you get into the hundreds and thousands, you might outsource production. But when you get into the tens of thousands, you might bring it back again. It gives you flexibility and control for each market. Because these tools are digital, they lend themselves to automated production. We’ve brought electronics factories and robotics production back from China. Because the process has become so digitized it has resolved the usual disadvantage of doing business here, which is expensive labor.

Q: Can you give me some examples of ventures that typify this new movement?

Anderson: One of the best examples is MakerBots, the 3-D printer company that’s building a facility in Brooklyn, of all places. You would expect the leaders in this area to be leaders in machinery or even industrial printers, like HP or Brother. But MakerBots started as a hobby and last year they raised $10 million dollars to move this to larger-scale production. They find advantages to being in Brooklyn, which includes access to designers and engineers and software developers and marketing. The benefits of that proximity help offset the additional costs of working out of Brooklyn, and contribute to the new American manufacturing model.

Q: Do you have any forecasts for which industries will become the most competitive?

Anderson: I think you have to ask where these new digital tools are having the biggest impact. Electronics are a perfect example, and the automation has gotten so big that you can make these things competitively almost anywhere. Other industries that are coming back are specialty bicycles and automotives. This evening I’m driving down to see the new Tesla plant [in Silicon Valley]. The Tesla [an electric car] is being made in an old GM/Toyota plant that shut down because it wasn’t competitive. When you look at this you have to ask: What changed? The answer is twofold: the manufacturing technology itself changed to be more automated, more flexible and more digital; and the products changed to lend themselves better to that kind of manufacturing. A Tesla is more like a laptop on wheels, and it’s now less about aluminum and more about software. As cars become more like iPods, Americans will become more competitive at making them.

Q: Do you think we’re as attached to physical products as we once were? After all, it was the Internet that revolutionized publishing and not the home printer.

Anderson: Desktop publishing offered the opportunity to be a publisher, but we didn’t do anything very interesting with it – it was mostly church newsletters and missing cat posters. However, it did get people thinking about fonts and page design and layout and the composition of communication. When we did get the capability to touch a button and reach a million people, we used those skills that we learned on a small scale. It was also a bit of a mental leap; something that was previously closed to professionals was now open to anyone. First you have to liberate the technology, then you can make it efficient and worth doing."