Paper 2: Benjamin Coderch
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Paper: In the next Industrial revolution, Atoms are the New Bits, by Benjamin Coderch The headquarters of Local Motors is located in Wareham, Massachusetts the office reveals itself as an example of the power of micro-factories. In June, they have released the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, and the costumers themselves will do the final assembly as part of a “build experience”. Each of their designs is released under a shared-friendly Creative Commons license. The car was prototyped in the Local Motor’s workshop, but it was build in Factory Five Racing, a kit-cat company. Jay Rogers, CEO of Local Motors says that the sow a way around typical kit-cars. His company opted for totally original designs. It is, a cross between a Baja racer and a P-51 Mustang fighter plane. The process of creation was a competition. The winner was Sangho Kim, a 30-year-old graphic artist. 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. Local Motors plans to release between 500 and 2,000 units of each model. While in Harvard, Rogers saw a presentation on Threadless, the open-design T-shirt Company, which showed him the power of crowdsourcing. Rogers estimates that less than 30 percent of car design students get jobs at auto companies upon graduation. The rest become frustrated car designers, exactly the pool of talent that might respond to a well-organized vehicle design competition and community 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. 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. Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. As the MI professor Eric von Hippel says “Hardware is becoming much more like software”. Not just because there’s so much software in hardware but also because of the availability of common platforms, easy-to- use tools, Web-based collaboration, and Internet distribution. The academic way to put lower barriers to this is that global supply chains have become scale-free, able to serve the garage inventor and Sony. Two forces, the explosion of powerful prototyping tools and the business practices of mostly Chinese factories drive this change. Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user- generated content- all these digital trends have begun to play out in the atoms too. In short, atoms are the new bits. It all starts with the tools. Now you can get a 3-D printer from MarketBot at $1,000. You can print plastic parts from digital files or even modify an object you already have. We’ve seemed the DIY movement boom around simple platforms as T-shirts and coffee mugs, and then expand into handcrafting. Now it’s moving to more complex platforms such as 3D models and open source electronics hardware.The second part is how this new industrial age has been opened to individuals, letting them scale from prototypes into full production. This because two factors, the web centrism of business in China, plus, the current economic crisis that drives companies to seek higher- margin custom orders. Using platforms such as Alibaba.com, customers all over the world and providers in China can communicate easily using live chat, and close deals in minutes. Another example is Shanzai.com, who operates a business without observing the traditional rules or practices often resulting in innovative and unusual products or business models. Not log ago, all this was impossible. To see how it was to be back in the 20 th century, watch the movie Flash of Genius. The film is based on the story of Bob Kearns who invented the intermittent windshield wiper. Rather than sell the technology to a big company he decides to build his own company. Finally the deal is abruptly chuted off, Ford steals the idea and he goes mad. Using the new model he would have a manufacturer in China to create the custom assembly and then straight to his costumers. This new model is applied in TechShop, a chain of DIY workspaces. This is an incubator for the atoms age. The concept of “small batch”, a term most often applied to bourbon now is applied to companies focused more on the quality of their products than the size of the market. Let me tell you my own story. Three years ago, I started thinking about how gyroscope sensors were getting. I realized, you could turn a radio controlled model airplane into a drone. At the time, the available models were expensive and without the best quality. I started DIY Drones, a community site with the help of Jordi Muñoz, then a 21-year-old-self-taugth from Mexico living in California. Eventually, we had a design we were happy with. How to commercialize it? We could do it ourselves, but we thought it might be better to partner with a retailer. This was SparkFun. Every day our Web site takes orders and prints out the shipping labels. The retail day ends at 3:30 pm with a run to the post office and UPS to send everything off. In our first year, we’ll do about $250,000 in revenue, with demand rising fast and a lot of products in the pipeline. The difference between this kind of small business and the dry cleaners and corner shops that make up the majority of micro-enterprise in the country is that we’re global and high tech. How big can these small enterprises get? Most of the companies I’ve described sell thousands of units — 10,000 is considered a breakout success. But one that has graduated to the big leagues is Aliph, which makes the Jawbone noise-canceling wireless headsets. Aliph was founded in 1999, but it has no factories. It outsources all of its production. It’s the ultimate virtual manufacturing company: Aliph makes bits and its partners make atoms, and together they can take on Sony. Welcome to the next Industrial Revolution.
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Transcript of Paper 2: Benjamin Coderch
Paper: In the next Industrial revolution, Atoms are the New Bits, by Benjamin Coderch The headquarters of Local Motors is located in Wareham, Massachusetts the office reveals itself as an example of the power of micro-factories. In June, they have released the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, and the costumers themselves will do the final assembly as part of a “build experience”. Each of their designs is released under a shared-friendly Creative Commons license. The car was prototyped in the Local Motor’s workshop, but it was build in Factory Five Racing, a kit-cat company. Jay Rogers, CEO of Local Motors says that the sow a way around typical kit-cars. His company opted for totally original designs. It is, a cross between a Baja racer and a P-51 Mustang fighter plane. The process of creation was a competition. The winner was Sangho Kim, a 30-year-old graphic artist. 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. Local Motors plans to release between 500 and 2,000 units of each model. While in Harvard, Rogers saw a presentation on Threadless, the open-design T-shirt Company, which showed him the power of crowdsourcing. Rogers estimates that less than 30 percent of car design students get jobs at auto companies upon graduation. The rest become frustrated car designers, exactly the pool of talent that might respond to a well-organized vehicle design competition and community 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. 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. Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. As the MI professor Eric von Hippel says “Hardware is becoming much more like software”. Not just because there’s so much software in hardware but also because of the availability of common platforms, easy-to-use tools, Web-based collaboration, and Internet distribution. The academic way to put lower barriers to this is that global supply chains have become scale-free, able to serve the garage inventor and Sony. Two forces, the explosion of powerful prototyping tools and the business practices of mostly Chinese factories drive this change. Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user-generated content- all these digital trends have begun to play out in the atoms too. In short, atoms are the new bits. It all starts with the tools. Now you can get a 3-D printer from MarketBot at $1,000. You can print plastic parts from digital files or even modify an object you already have. We’ve seemed the DIY movement boom around simple platforms as T-shirts and coffee mugs, and then expand
into handcrafting. Now it’s moving to more complex platforms such as 3D models and open source electronics hardware.The second part is how this new industrial age has been opened to individuals, letting them scale from prototypes into full production. This because two factors, the web centrism of business in China, plus, the current economic crisis that drives companies to seek higher-margin custom orders. Using platforms such as Alibaba.com, customers all over the world and providers in China can communicate easily using live chat, and close deals in minutes. Another example is Shanzai.com, who operates a business without observing the traditional rules or practices often resulting in innovative and unusual products or business models. Not log ago, all this was impossible. To see how it was to be back in the 20th century, watch the movie Flash of Genius. The film is based on the story of Bob Kearns who invented the intermittent windshield wiper. Rather than sell the technology to a big company he decides to build his own company. Finally the deal is abruptly chuted off, Ford steals the idea and he goes mad. Using the new model he would have a manufacturer in China to create the custom assembly and then straight to his costumers. This new model is applied in TechShop, a chain of DIY workspaces. This is an incubator for the atoms age. The concept of “small batch”, a term most often applied to bourbon now is applied to companies focused more on the quality of their products than the size of the market. Let me tell you my own story. Three years ago, I started thinking about how gyroscope sensors were getting. I realized, you could turn a radio controlled model airplane into a drone. At the time, the available models were expensive and without the best quality. I started DIY Drones, a community site with the help of Jordi Muñoz, then a 21-year-old-self-taugth from Mexico living in California. Eventually, we had a design we were happy with. How to commercialize it? We could do it ourselves, but we thought it might be better to partner with a retailer. This was SparkFun. Every day our Web site takes orders and prints out the shipping labels. The retail day ends at 3:30 pm with a run to the post office and UPS to send everything off. In our first year, we’ll do about $250,000 in revenue, with demand rising fast and a lot of products in the pipeline. The difference between this kind of small business and the dry cleaners and corner shops that make up the majority of micro-enterprise in the country is that we’re global and high tech. How big can these small enterprises get? Most of the companies I’ve described sell thousands of units — 10,000 is considered a breakout success. But one that has graduated to the big leagues is Aliph, which makes the Jawbone noise-canceling wireless headsets. Aliph was founded in 1999, but it has no factories. It outsources all of its production. It’s the ultimate virtual manufacturing company: Aliph makes bits and its partners make atoms, and together they can take on Sony. Welcome to the next Industrial Revolution.
