Transcript Lowering the Barriers to Entrepreneurship

Hackers and the Maker Movement: Technological &
Institutional Changes Are Lowering the Threshold for
Entrepreneurship
Howard E. Aldrich
Mid-Sweden University
October 8, 2014
Two Global Trends
 Technological revolution
 Institutional
 IT & Social Media
transformations &
entrepreneurship
 Enabling scaling down/up
 Legacy of 1960’s
 Micro-everything
 Localism & community
 Facilitating collaboration &
cooperation
Social Innovation & New Institutions:
“Hot Causes”
 Rebelling against the
“closed box”
 Norms & values promoting
local production & control
 Doing things for yourself
 Earning living from own
creativity & labor
“If You Can Imagine It, You Can Make It”
 User-Driven Innovation
 Medical devices
 Construction
 Juvenile products
 Extreme sports
 Typesetting
 Technology wants to be
free!
 Open source hardware
movement
 DIY  DIT
 Enabling technologies
 Laser cutters
 Computer Numerical
Control (CNC) for
machines
 3D Printers
 Sewing machines
A Few of The New Tools
Existing Small Firms: Competitive Advantages with
Digital Fabrication (Ted Hall)
 Higher quality: complex
operations done cheaply
 Lowered cost: less capital –
engineering embedded in
equipment
 Great flexibility –
reconfigure quickly & easy
to connect & integrate
work flows across firms
Where Do “Makers” Go to Gain Access to
Tools?
 Closed Access - $$ driven
 Open Access – Cooperative
 Accelerators
& Collaborative Spaces
(Innovation Communities)
 Tech Shop
 Makerspaces
 Incubators
 Fab Labs (MIT-sponsored)
 1000’s globally
Hackerspaces - Examples
 Stockholm Makerspace
 Swedish Hackerspaces
 Denmark Makerspaces
 Oakland:
LiberatingOurselvesLocally
 Brooklyn: NYC Resistor
 Philadelphia: The HackTory
 Culver City: CrashSpace
Institutional Structures of Cooperation
& Collaboration
 Education
 Instructables
 Lynda
 Gatherings & Celebrations
 Sharing & diffusion
 Maker Shed
 Brokers & bridges (crowd-
sourced design & mfg)
 Maker Faires
 Quirky
 Atlanta Maker Faire
 Shapeways
 Media
 Make magazine
 Legal/regulatory
 Creative Commons
 Thingiverse (Makerbot)
 100K Garages
 Cloudfab
 Alibaba
Small is the New Big
“Punching Above Their Weight”
 Marketing & Sales
(“community”)
 Etsy
 Art Fire
 Dawanda
 Fulfillment & Shipping
 Amazon.com
 UPS
 Payment
 Bluesnap
 PayPal
 Web Hosting & Outsourced
Business Services (“the
cloud”)
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GoDaddy
Outright
SalesForce
Workday
99 Designs
CrowdSpring
Issues Raised by Technological &
Institutional Changes
Will pursuit of profits corrupt the “community” &
collaborative spirit?
2. Has access really been democratized?
3. Will there be “too many” entrepreneurs?
4. Will these trends lead to solutions to “big” problems?
1.