(2010-01-31) Anderson Atoms Are The New Bits

Chris Anderson on the application of the Network Economy to physical-product businesses (Maker).

• Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world.

• LocalMotors Rally Fighter AutoMobile - the Rally Fighter’s body was designed by Local Motors’ community of volunteers and puts the lie to the notion that you can’t create anything good by committee (so long as the community is well managed, well led, and well equipped with tools like 3-D design software and photorealistic rendering technology). The result is a car that puts Detroit to shame... While the community crafted the exterior, Local Motors designed or selected the chassis, engine, and transmission thanks to relationships with companies like Penske Automotive Group, which helped the firm source everything from dashboard dials to the new BMW clean diesel engine the Rally Fighter will use. This combination — have the pros handle the elements that are critical to performance, safety, and manufacturability while the community designs the parts that give the car its shape and style — allows crowdsourcing to work even for a product whose use has life-and-death implications... Local Motors has just 10 full-time employees (that number will grow to more than 50 as it opens build centers, the first of which will be in Phoenix), holds almost no inventory.

• The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a ProtoType will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.

• In a converted brewery in Brooklyn, BrePettis and his team of hardware engineers are making the first sub-$1,000 3-D printer, the open source MakerBot. (Desktop Fab)

• We’ve already seen this DIY creation movement boom around such simple platforms as T-Shirt-s and coffee mugs, then expand into handcrafting at Etsy (which did about $200 million in sales last year). Now it’s moving to more complex platforms — like 3-D models and plastic fabrication — and Open Source Hardware like the pioneering Arduino project.

• With the tools in place, the second part of this new industrial age is how manufacturing has been opened up to individuals, letting them scale prototypes into full production runs. Over the past few years, Chinese manufacturers have evolved to handle small orders more efficiently. This means that one-person enterprises can get things made in a factory the way only big companies could before. (China) The rise of Shan Zhai business practices “suggests a new approach to Economic Recovery as well, one based on small companies well networked with each other,” observes Tom Igoe, a core developer of the open source Arduino computing platform.

With the rise of the factory in the Industrial Age, Karl Marx fretted that a tradesman could no longer afford the tools to ply his trade. The Economies Of Scale of industrial production crowded out the individual. Although the benefits of such industrialization were lower prices and better products, the cost was homogeneity. Combined with big-box retailers (Big Retail), the marketplace became increasingly dominated by the fruits of Mass Production: goods designed for everyone, with the resulting limited diversity and choice that implies (Monoculture). But today those tools of production are getting so cheap that they are once again within the reach of many individuals.

• (label issue - see 2009-07-31-LindermanBoutiqueBizRename)

• For a final example of that, swing to the Seattle suburbs to meet Will Chapman of BrickArms. Out of a small industrial space, BrickArms fills gaps in the Lego product line, going where the Danish toy giant fears to tread: hardcore weaponry... Chapman’s three sons package the parts, which he sells direct. Today, BrickArms also has resellers in the UK, Australia, Sweden, Canada, and Germany.

• BillJoy’s law turned RonaldCoase’s law upside down. Now, working within a company often imposes higher transaction costs than running a project online.

• (Anderson's own UAV-biz story) To pursue this project, I started DIY Drones, a community site, and found and began working with some kindred spirits, led by JordiMuñoz, then a 21-year-old High School graduate from Mexico living in Riverside, California. Muñoz was self-taught — with world-class skills in embedded electronics and aeronautics. Jordi turned me on to Arduino, and together we designed an autonomous blimp controller and then an aircraft autopilot board. We designed the boards the way all electronics tinkerers do, with parts bought from online shops, wired together on prototyping breadboards. Once it worked on the breadboard, we laid out the schematic diagrams with Cad Soft Eagle and started designing it as a custom printed circuit board (PCB). Each time we had a design that looked good onscreen, we’d upload it to a commercial PCB fab, and a couple of weeks later, samples would arrive at our door. We’d solder on the components, try them out, and then fix our errors and otherwise make improvements for the next version... We thought it might be better to partner with a retailer. The one that seemed culturally matched was Spark Fun, which designs, makes, and sells electronics for the growing Open Source Hardware community... Spark Fun makes, stocks, and sells our autopilot and a few other products that we designed; we get to spend our time working on R&D and bear no inventory risk. Some products we wanted to make were too time-intensive for Spark Fun, so we made them ourselves. Now, in a rented Los Angeles garage, we have our own mini Spark Fun. Rather than a pick-and-place robot, we have a kid with sharp eyes and a steady hand, and for a reflow oven we use what is basically a modified toaster oven. We can do scores of boards per day this way; when demand outstrips production, we’ll upgrade to a small pick-and-place robot.