Third Episode: Collaborative production, from outsourcing to crowdsourcing

In 1950, in the era of mass production, New York City was the capital of manufacturing in America, with 1 million of people working in the sector. Today only 80,000 people are employed in the sector, largely by specialist producers. Yet nourished by the city’s entrepreneurial spirit, a new industry is emerging. It might be called social manufacturing.

Quirky, for example, is a design studio with a small factory complete with a couple of 3D printers, a laser cutter, milling machines, a spray-painting booth and other bits of equipment. This prototyping shop is central to their business of turning other people’s ideas into products.

Yes, have you ever had an idea about a product with no knowledge on how to build it? Now you know Quirky exists. The process works like this: a user submits an idea and if enough people like it, Quirky0s product-development team makes a prototype. Users review this online and can contribute towards its final design, packaging and marketing, and help set a price for it. Quirky then looks for suitable manufacturers. The product is sold on the Quirky website and, if demand grows, by retail chains. Quirky also handles patents and standards approvals and gives a 30% share of the revenue from direct sales to the inventors and others who have helped. In this way, Quirky can quickly establish if there is a market for a product and set the right price before committing itself to making it.

Shapeways is an another online manufacturing community, it specializes in 3D printing services. It shipped 750,000 products last year. Users upload their designs to get instant automated quotes for printing with industrial 3D printing machines in a variety of different materials. Users can also sell their goods online, setting their own prices. Some designs can be also customized by buyers.

Easy online access to 3D printing has three big implications for manufacturing:

1.    Speed to market is increased

2.    Market risk almost inexistent: entrepreneurs can test ideas before scaling up and tweak the designers in response to feedback from buyers

3.    It becomes possible to produce things that cannot be made in other ways, usually because they are too intricate to be machined.

Once in digital form, things become easy to copy. This means protecting intellectual property will be just as hard as it is in other industries that have gone digital.

MFG.com, another online production service, provides a lot of services with more than 200,000 members in 50 countries. Firms use it ot connect and collaborate, uploading digital designs, getting quotes and rating the services provided. This could tunr into the virtual equivalent of an industrial cluster.

Dassault Systemes, a French software firm, has created an online virtual environment in which employees, suppliers, and consumers can work together to turn nee ideas into reality. It provides lifelike manikins on which to try out new products. They call such services “product life-cycle management” because they extend computer modeling from the conception of a product to its demise, which nowadays means recycling.

As digitization has freed some people from working in an office, the same could happen in manufacturing. Product design and simulation can now be done on a personal computer and accessed on the cloud. It means people involved in can work from anywhere and share ideas. This could means the factory of the future could be anyone sitting in his own office.

Source: The Economist, Special Report on Manufacturing and Innovation, A third industrial revolution, April 21^st 2012.