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272 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
The beauty of the Web is that it democratized the tools both of invention and of production. Anyone with an idea for a service can turn it into a product with some software code (these days it hardly even requires much programming skill, and what you need you can learn online)—no patent required. Then, with a keystroke, you can “ship it” to a global market of billions of people. Maybe lots of people will notice and like it, or maybe they won’t. Maybe there will be a business model attached, or maybe there won’t. Maybe riches lie at the end of this rainbow, or maybe they don’t. But the point is that the path from “inventor” to “entrepreneur” is so foreshortened it hardly exists at all anymore.
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We’ve seen what the Web’s model of democratized innovation has done to spur entrepreneurship and economic growth. Just imagine what a similar model could do in the larger economy of Real Stuff. More to the point, there’s no need to imagine—it’s already starting to happen. That’s what this book is about.
For most of the past century, the natural variation and choice in products such as music, movies, and books have been hidden by the limited “carrying capacity” of the traditional distribution systems of physical stores, broadcast channels, and megaplex movie theaters. But once these products were available online in digital marketplaces with unlimited “shelf space,” for lack of a better phrase, demand followed: the monopoly of the blockbuster was over. The mass market in culture has turned into a Long Tail of micro-markets, as any contact with a teenager these days will confirm (we’re all indie now!). In short: our species turns out to be a lot more diverse than our twentieth-century markets reflected.
As Cory Doctorow imagined it a few years ago in a great sci-fi book also called Makers,3 which was an inspiration for me and countless others in the movement, “The days of companies with names like ‘General Electric’ and ‘General Mills’ and ‘General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.” Welcome to the New Industrial Revolution.
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Thus, the Third Industrial Revolution is best seen as the combination of digital manufacturing and personal manufacturing: the industrialization of the Maker Movement.
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Nations have always had their tinkerers and inventors. But the shift to digital changes everything about the ability to get those ideas and inventions produced and sold.
Machines allow us to work faster, doing more in less time. That liberates those hours for other activities, whether productive or leisure. What the First Industrial Revolution did create, more than anything else, was a vast surplus of time, which was reallocated to invent practically everything that defines the modern world. Four hundred years ago, nearly everyone you’d know would be involved in producing the staples of existence: food, clothing, shelter. Today, odds are, almost none of them are. Rao writes: The primary effect of steam was not that it helped colonize a new land, but that it started the colonization of time. Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth [a reference to the innovation and entrepreneurship growth theories of the economist Joseph Schumpeter] as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle.
Why? Because making things has gone digital: physical objects now begin as designs on screens, and those designs can be shared online as files. This has been happening over the past few decades in factories and industrial design shops, but now it’s happening on consumer desktops and in basements, too. And once an industry goes digital, it changes in profound ways, as we’ve seen in everything from retail to publishing. The biggest transformation is not in the way things are done, but in who’s doing it. Once things can be done on regular computers, they can be done by anyone. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing happen now in manufacturing. Today, anyone with an invention or good design can upload files to a service to have that product made, in small batches or large, or make it themselves with increasingly powerful digital desktop fabrication tools such as 3D printers. Would-be entrepreneurs and inventors are no longer at the mercy of large companies to manufacture their ideas.
The Web, from Amazon to eBay, revealed a Long Tail of demand for niche physical goods; now the democratized tools of production are enabling a Long Tail of supply, too.
Got a classic car, perhaps an old MG roadster? A few clicks in your browser and you’re in the domain of hyperspecialized suppliers who focus on making nothing but replacement bonnet release cables for car models that haven’t been made for a generation.
The past ten years have been about discovering new ways to create, invent, and work together on the Web. The next ten years will be about applying those lessons to the real world. This book is about the next ten years.
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The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital—the Long Tail of bits. Now the same is happening to manufacturing—the Long Tail of things.
So I won’t be invoking “mass customization” much here. Instead, what the new manufacturing model enables is a mass market for niche products. Think ten thousand units, not ten million (mass) or one (mass customization). Products no longer have to sell in big numbers to reach global markets and find their audience. That’s because they don’t do it from the shelves of Wal-Mart. Instead, they use e-commerce, driven by an increasingly discriminating consumer who follows social media and word of mouth to buy specialty products online.
There is no law that says that Maker companies have to remain small. After all, many of today’s biggest Silicon Valley giants, from Hewlett-Packard to Apple, started in a garage...
Given a choice between infinite options and products that are cheap, available, and reliable, consumers tended to go the safe, one-size-fits-all route.
There was, however, another way. Over the past few years, a new phenomenon of “crowdfunding” has taken off, by which supporters and potential customers collectively contribute the money necessary to get the product made. Crowdfunding may take many forms, from glorified tip jars to formal loans backed by people, not banks. The one Andon chose was Kickstarter, a website where people post descriptions of their projects and anyone can chip in to help.
“Markets of ten thousand” defines the successful niche strategy for products and services delivered online. That number is large enough to build a business on, but small enough to remain focused and avoid huge competition. It is the missing space in the mass-production industry, the dark matter in the marketplace—the Long Tail of stuff. It is also the opportunity for smaller, nimbler companies that have emerged from the very markets they serve, enabled by the new tools of democratized manufacturing to route around the old retail and production barriers.
So now the 3-D printer is where Jobs’s Macintosh and LaserWriter were twenty-five years ago. As with the first laser printers, 3-D printing is still a bit expensive and hard to use; it’s not yet for everyone. We haven’t really figured out what the killer app will be.
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Like then, the first users are a little lost. When desktop publishing was first introduced, tens of thousands of people discovered that they knew nothing about fonts, kerning, text flow, anchors, and all that; they had to learn a couple of centuries’ worth of publishing terms and techniques overnight. Many garish documents with a dog’s breakfast of typefaces ensued, but so did an explosion of creativity that ultimately led to today’s Web. Today, with the spread of desktop fabrication tools, a generation of amateurs is also being suddenly confronted with the baffling language and techniques of professional industrial design, just as they were in the desktop publishing era.
Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes magazine, thinks that 3-D printing “could be the transformative technology of the 2015–2025 period.” He writes: This has the potential to remake the economics of manufacturing from a large-scale industry back to an artisan model of small design shops with access to 3-D printers.
Chapman works at a different scale. He continues to design the weapons in CAD software and prototype with his desktop fabrication tools. Once they look good, he sends the file to a local toolmaker to reproduce the mold out of stainless steel, and then to a U.S.-based injection-molding company to make batches of a few thousand. Why not have the parts made in China? He could, he says, but the result would be “molds that take much longer to produce, with slow communication times and plastic that is subpar” (read: cheap). Furthermore, he says, “if your molds are in China, who knows what happens to them when you’re not using them? They could be run in secret to produce parts sold in secondary markets that you would not even know existed.”
This is a world where America can compete. And so can China. And Germany and Mexico and Poland. Digital manufacturing levels the global playing field. Any country can make things. The question is only what can they make better than anyone else.
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What kind of economic future does the rise of the Maker Movement predict? Is it one where 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?