Nov

28

Part 5: The evolution of mass customization and personal manufacturing

Filed Under HomeFabbing, Personal Manufacturing, Mass customization | 1 Comment

If you can imagine an object. Someone can build it. How does personal manufacturing relate to the various topics covered here? Well it democratizes manufacturing and design choices to everyone, everywhere. It decouples the design, manufacturing, assembly, and marketing of products like never before. I have categorized these related concepts into three levels of increasing complexity: 1) Mass customization, 2) 2D and 3D object printers, 3) Home manufacturing.

Level 1: Mass customization.
Mass customization puts a certain level of choice in the hands of the customer starting with a base, unchanging object. It allows you to customize a mass produced product to your specification along certain pre-defined configurations. Anyone can do this. There are thousands of examples of it and most people have experienced this in one form or another. Buying a Dell. Uploading an image for a product on CafePress. Designing a Nike shoe. Even your own tea.

Level 2: 2D and 3D printing.
Ponoko is, in my opinion, one of the best examples of personal manufacturing in the 2D realm. Users can upload image files (whether that be CAD or scanned in free-hand drawing), specify any of a number of flat materials, and Ponoko will input it into their magic laser cutters and send you the result. It doesn’t stop there: you can also sell your resulting products through the site. Ponoko has been improving and releasing new features at an impressive clip over the last 2 years or so. Keep an eye on them. Manufacturing as a service.

Going from 2D to 3D: While Ponoko seems farthest along in democratizing 2D printing of objects, Shapeways seems to have the best, most user friendly, option for 3D printing and distribution of objects.

Confused about the various 2D and 3D printing technologies available? Check out this great compendium of videos on much of the tech.

Level 3: Home Fabbing
For the power-geek: home fabbing (with self-replicating machines, of course) you too can build a CNC machine that creates 3D objects or cuts flat materials. Just download the design and let your machine have at it.
printer1.jpg
Of course, the current adoption of these various technologies stand at about the same level as personal computers in the late 70s: expensive, geared towards geeks, inconvenient, and a small market.

Bringing this all together you have a decoupling of the design, manufacturing, assembly, and marketing of physical objects down to the individual level. As this evolves further the options expand incredibly; here’s a scenario (And Shapeways comes pretty close to this today). I post a design, then there are many paths:

- I can then order a copy for myself.
- Someone else orders the physical object which is printed in a one-off run.
- Another person licenses the design for the right to produce the object for personal use and downloads it to their home-fabber where they can tweak the design and actually create it.
- Someone licenses the design for 100 copies and sells them locally after having them produced at their local personal manufacturing facility.
- A large retailer licenses the design for distribution in their stores.

Pretty rad, right?

Resources and examples:
Level 1:
Mass Customization and Open Innovation News by Frank Piller
Configurator database
Design a Tea
Dell
List of mass customization providers

Level 2:
Ponoko
Design Democracy ‘08
List of Personal Manufacturing providers
FigurePrints (print out avatars in 3D)
That’s My Face
Fabjectory: Virtual Objects in Real Life
Shapeways
ZapFab
Design My Idea
eMachineShop

Level 3:
Some Rights Reserved
Fab@Home
TechShop
Breaking the mould
Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop–from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication

Nov

13

Part 4: The Competition Model

Filed Under Crowdsourcing | 2 Comments

One aspect of many crowdsourced efforts is the ever-present competition. From the X-Prize to Innocentive, prizes for innovation, new ideas, designs, and problem solving are SO hot right now. Sometimes its simply a publicity stunt other times it is the core business strategy of a firm. The model has been around for centuries in various forms, in the arena of architecture for example: a slew of architects produce concepts for a building and the owner decides whose design wins. And of course, competitions in general are everywhere in which one might put forth a huge amount of effort, lose, and have nothing to show for it. What I focus on here are newer incarnations which the Internet has helped to flourish.

Prizes are generally set up such that someone posts an issue they want resolved or work they want done or a community of enthusiasts works to give an award for work around a specific area on an ongoing basis (Threadless). They set their price for successful completion and anyone can contribute – professional, amateur, moron, and genius alike — that is where the power arises. A winner is chosen and the prize awarded. The issue, though, that many have with this approach is that it can be exploitative and opens up businesses to… let’s say ethical challenges, in that the work is completed in some cases and the company can abscond with your work without paying.

Further, looking at it from an economic perspective: if you post a $300 reward for a logo and 50 people do, say, $150 worth of work each, that is a total of $7500 worth of effort. Or $7200 worth of “wasted” effort. (Of course many of these people might be doing this for fun as a hobby or with free time in which case it’s not technically wasted effort but effort that would not have been utilized in the first place.)

Some controversy has arisen around these, particularly in the design worlds: Pros hate it because it lowers prices paid for work and potentially the quality of the work (in their view), amateurs love it given that this creates a way to make a few extra dollars doing something they love anyway, and small businesses who might not have been able to afford professional prices obviously benefit. It is distinct from spec work in that spec work entails one professional or company creating a work in the hopes of selling it but without any guarantee or prior commitment from anyone that it will be bought.

A variety of sites which will be and have been covered in the past here employ this strategy so here are a sampling of them:

Competition examples:
99designs
Threadless
Crowdspring
Idea Crossing
Fujitsu-Siemens Innovation Contest
Netflix Prize

Related:
Derek Powazek - Pixish, Spec Work, and Graggers
The Power of the Prize

Nov

3

User-led innovation report, the Australians get it.

Filed Under Crowdsourcing, Outside Innovation, Wisdom of Crowds | Leave a Comment

I finally got around to reading a great report out of Swinburne University of Technology written by Darren Sharp & Mandy Salomon called “User-led Innovation: A New Framework for Co-creating Business and Social Value“. It does a great job of tying together many of the themes discussed on co>innovative. A variety of innovations over the last couple of decades have been improving in parallel as well as building off of each other to create this… this thing that is going on, whatever you want to call it:

Open source software, citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, user-generated content, social networks, the sharing economy, peer production, Multi-User Virtual Environments, participatory media, collaborative creativity. Distributed capitalism. These are all terms in the rapidly expanding lexicon of the field of ‘user-led innovation’. For much of the 20th century business operated on an enterprise logic of ‘managerial capitalism’ which maintains that value is created by organisational producers and is stored inside the products and services they sell.

Quoting Eric von Hippel:

Historically the assumption has been that manufacturers are the innovators, they go and they look at users, understand what they need and then develop something in response. We then went and looked at the histories of innovation and found out that very often, very commercially successful products actually had been developed by users at the leading edge of a market-based trend first. So it appeared that in fact innovation was user-led, which means that the users actually develop prototype products and show their value and use of what they really want.

These lead users (who can be viewed as pre-early adopters, creating their own solutions) have entered into an increasingly ideal epoch in which more and more tools are available every day to innovate: tools of media production and distribution, rapid fabrication tools such as widely available laser cutters and 3D printers, communication with other enthusiasts, etc. This distributed capitalism is the result of the democratization of innovation that Eric Von Hippel wrote about in the aptly titled Democratizing Innovation

. The Support Economy

Below is a great classification of four successful and productive user-led niches:

  • Social Currency Niche — Myspace, Flickr, YouTube: people create content and gain attention and connect with others.
  • Collaborative Niche — Wikipedia, open source software: people come together and perform part of a larger task to reach a common goal.
  • Extractive niche — sort of the unpleasant side of all this in which companies try to exploit free revealing from the crowd, attempting to get something for nothing or next to nothing while ignoring the desires of the crowd.
  • Hybrid niche — combines elements of the above.

    • User Led Services Ecology

    If you ever find yourself scratching your head about exactly what I am talking about, I would highly recommend reading the report.
    (Also wanted to say Hi to Paul.)


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