Each step of conceiving, designing, prototyping, manufacturing, and selling are within reach of just about anyone with a surprisingly small amount of capital. Couple that with bringing in the crowd at any point to help fund or vet ideas and the current situation becomes that much more interesting.
Each part of the chain for truly distributed and democratized product design and personal manufacturing have essentially come together to form a coherent whole.
Chris Anderson (of the Long Tail) recently articulated an interesting metaphor regarding social media and driving a project/organization forward. In his post Open source is a company; social media is a country I would call particular attention to his take on successful open source projects:
Many people mistakenly think that open source projects are emergent, [...]
