Mass Customization & Open Innovation News

Updated and realistic market data on personal 3D printers

3D printing or additivae manufactuing is a hot topic today. Recently, I found this absurdly expensive market study on 3D printing (never had the idea that you can charge $100 per figure). But since many year, my best source about this topic has been Terry Wohlers.

Terry is president of Wohlers Associates, Inc., an independent consulting firm he founded more than 25 years ago. Through this company, Wohlers has provided consulting assistance to more than 170 organizations in 23 countries. Also, he has provided lots of advise to the investment community. And on top, he really is a great guy!

On his blog, Wohlers Talk, he regularly posts interesting news from and views on how the industry evolves, put into perspective by matching it with his years of professional experience.

Recently he published some interesting thoughts on 3D-printers. As can be seen from the latest Wolters Report on the state-of-the-art and development of additive manufacturing and 3d-printing, sales figures of said 3d-printers have been dramatically increasing over the past years.

The report states that especially personal 3D-printers sales have grown by 289% in 2011. Yet, this is said to account for not more than about 26 million USD so far, making this market appear to hold a lot of potential.

However, in his post, Terry describes the market potential for presonal 3D-printers in a rather disillusionating yet more realistic fashion:

Wohlers Talk: Why Most Adults Will Never Use a 3D Printer

Many have speculated on whether everyday consumers will purchase and use a 3D printer. With prices dipping to $350 for a kit and $550 for an assembled system, they are certainly affordable. Some believe that a 3D printer will someday be in every home and used to produce replacement parts as household products break or wear out.

As shown by Shapeways, Materialise, FutureFactories, Ponoko, and others, consumers are definitely interested in products made by additive manufacturing and 3D printing. Shapeways claims to be producing more than 90,000 parts (about 25,000 products) per month by AM, with a high percentage going to consumers. For years, Materialise’s .MGX division has offered striking lighting designs, sculptures, and other products, with consumers paying hundreds of euros for one of them.

Indeed, consumers have an appetite for products made by additive manufacturing. However, most consumers will never own or operate a machine to produce these products. Instead, they will go to Shapeways, Amazon, or to another service or storefront to purchase these products. Most will not know, or even care, how the products were made—no different from the way they now purchase products. Consumers only care about receiving good value.

Someday, a company will offer a very low-cost, easy-to-use, and safe 3D printer targeted at children. This market opportunity, I believe, is very big because children like to imagine, create, touch things, play, and entertain themselves. These kids will be producing vehicles, action figures, puzzles, and just about everything imaginable. They are our future designers, engineers, and manufacturing professionals.

Most parents and adults are not candidates for a 3D printer. They do not want to mess with the data, manufacturing process, clean-up, and finishing of parts and products. Even if they owned or had access to a machine, it would probably not be capable of producing parts in the right material with the mechanical properties, color, surface finish, and texture needed for the part(s) they are trying to create or replace. These types of parts will continue to be produced by industry professionals and that’s why most adults will never use a 3D printer.

Source: Wohlers Talk, http://wohlersassociates.com/blog/2012/07/why-most-adults-will-never-use-a-3d-printer/ (July 26th 2012)

 

Market Watch: Formulor: Professional-grade yet easy and affordable 3D-designing and production

If you co-host a large-scale mass customization conference as we did with the Create Your Own (CYO) last year, it is delighting to learn that connections established during the event are resulting in new ventures and products. 

One result of CYO networking has been the cooperation between virtual product presentation specialist Open Experience and Formulor, a Berlin based company offering customized 3D-products. Formulor is one of the German frontend's for Ponoko.

 

The limit is your imagination (and what a laser cutter can do). Example model. Click to enlarge!

Formulor gives its users all the tools necesary to design whatever shape and form they like and to have it laser cut and engraved before shipping it to your doorstep. The really great part of this is the consumer frontend which is about as easy to use as a "conventional" configurator and yet can do so much more.

 

It enables casual users and professional designers alike to quickly bring any form out of their mind onto a virtual canvas. One can do so by either uploading an existing file (Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, inkscape) or by using the really convenient drawing and writing tools embedded into the configurator. 

Open Experience, a spin-off of the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie KIT and a specialist in 3D configuration,  has done a great job in designing the front end. Even without any knowledge of how to use a 2D-designing software you can easily get a nice-looking 3D object drawn and rendered in no time at all. 

Most of the work, the magic to it, if you will, happens in the background. While you draw and write on the virtual canvas the software translatest your entries into a 3D model which is presented at all times. You will always know how your design will look in "real life" once laser-cut and delivered to you. 

2D drawing canvas, ready for creative input. Click to Enlarge!

Furthermore the configurator automatically checks whether or not your design is actually technically producable, so you do not have to worry about that aspect at all: As long as it can be manufactured by Formulor's partner company Ponoko's laser cutters, you can design whatever you like.

And because Formulor checks your brainchild against Ponoko's personal factory API, pricing of your design is also constantly updated. 

 The base materials you chose from at the beginning of your configuration process include acrylic glass, cardboard, cork, corrugate card, decoflex veneer, felt, finnboard, leather, MDF, PET, paperboard, plywood, polypropylen, silicon and stamp rubber in a large variety of colors and thicknesses. 

This platform can really be of great value for all kinds of creatives, be it to visualize an idea, to prototype, to get special parts for your architectural model or just as part of your latest crafting of christmas gifts.

Besides this practical aspect it is a great example of how (conference) networking can help you identifying the right partner to get your business ahead of the competition. Formulor, Open Experience and Ponoko have created a very interesting tool for individual and affordable modeling here that could set standards in this branch.

More about Open Experience, Formulor and Ponoko on their respective websites. And to get an idea of how easy it is to use Formulor's frontend to form your own product, here is a video, too!

 

#MCPC2011 Program Highlights: MC Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management

In a series of postings, we present some of the program highligths of the MCPC 2011 conference. The following is just one of more than 50 sessions we will host on Nov 16-19 in San Francisco, CA.

Successful Mass Customization not only depends on the design and proper employment of the consumer backend (configurator). Of equal importance is the organizational structure "behind the scenes" that allows a company to actually keep the promiss of individual production while still remaining profitable. In this session we will hear expert advices about the key aspects of successful MC Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management.

 

Sessions 7.4 (Nov 19): MC Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management

Modeling & Simulation of MP-MC Apparel Manufacturing

Apparel companies that initiate Mass-Customization (MC) must identify a suitable manufacturing (assembly) strategy, which is vital for their success. Most companies that produce apparel using Mass Production (MP) systems, are interested in investigating if the existing systems can be used to implement a MC strategy.

In this part Muditha Senanayake (Cal Poly Pomona) and Trevor Little (North Carolina State University) will explore the opportunity to mix MP and MC using computer modeling and simulation. Based on varying sizes of bundles and varying frequencies of products tested on simulated production lines they will present their observations of the production system performance. As a result they will present possible implementations of mix manufacturing strategy and its limitations.

Using a Simulation-Based Framework to Design Supply Chain Offering Mass Customization in the UAE

Mass Customization has emerged as a successful business model that can address the contemporary challenges of global markets. Although companies have adopted various levels of MC, a major challenge for firms is to efficiently design their supply chain in function of their MC offers, which also needs to support the involvement of customers in the innovation process. Marc Poulin will present a work in progress of a simulation framework that enables UAE firms to design supply chains that offer MC products and services. Using the leading edge simulation software SIMIO he will model and simulate supply chain models in the UAE.

Methodology for Implementing the Right Supply Chain for Mass Customization

In this presentation Luigi Battezzati (University of Milan) will focus on the definition of preliminary implementation guidelines in order to define the proper supply chain for different products (emotional, functional), manufactured by different companies (mass or handcraft producer), in compliance with different winning criteria impacting on critical areas for Mass Customization

Listen to the full content of these talks at the MCPC 2011, Marriot SFO Airport, San Francisco, Nov 16-19, 2011:

- Conference Website and Registration

- All info here in one compact MCPC flyer

- Conference hotel and travel (rooms fill quickly, book now!)

- All posts about the conference in my blog

#MCPC2011 Program Highlight: Design Thinking for Open Innovation an Mass Customization (Showcase Symposium)

In a series of postings, we present some of the program highligths of the MCPC 2011 conference. The following is just one of more than 50 sessions we will host on Nov 16-19 in San Francisco, CA.

In this showcase session is  the participants will be provided with the latest results of scientific research on how mass customization and open innovation is evaluated by professional designers as well as on how aesthetic preferences are varying within different cultures. On top of that well known design agencies such as IDEO and designaffairs will present their approaches of how to integrate customers into their design processes.

Session 6.6 (Nov 19): Design Thinking for OI and MC (Showcase Symposium)

In this special showcase session will consist of five individual presentations by Dominik Walcher and fellow experts. Following that the presenting Open Innovation and Mass Customization specialists will engage in a panel discussion on MC, OI and Design.

Schowcase Speakers:

Dominik Walcher, (Salzburg University of Applied Sciences):
What designers think about Mass Customization and Open Innovation - A recent survey

Bernhard Rothbucher, (Salzburg University of Applied Sciences):
Cultural Customization - A case study research on natural acceptance

Minu Kumar, (San Francisco State University):
Think global, act local - A cross cultural study on aesthetic preferences

Christian Jurke, Director Design Strategy at designaffairs, Munich:
SimuPro – a method to create customer oriented solutions for global markets 

Blaise Bertrand, Associate Partner at IDEO:
Design Thinking - IDEO's method to integrate customers in the design process

Listen to the full content of these talks at the MCPC 2011, Marriot SFO Airport, San Francisco, Nov 16-19, 2011:

- Conference Website and Registration

- All info here in one compact MCPC flyer

- Conference hotel and travel (rooms fill quickly, book now!)

- All posts about the conference in my blog

#MCPC2011 Program Highlights: Rapid Innovation and Manufacturing in an International Production Enviroment

 

In a series of postings, we present some of the program highligths of the MCPC 2011 conference. The following is just one of more than 50 sessions we will host on Nov 16-19 in San Francisco, CA.

In a world of global markets and constant technical innovation one has to live up to the challenge of not only surviving on the individual markets but to out-innovate any competition at the highest pace possible. It goes without saying that for producing companies, production speed is a key competency. In sessions 6.3 & 7.3 we will take a look at expert techniques to accomplish this tough yet vital mission. 

Sessions 6.3 & 7.3 (Nov 19): Rapid Innovation and Manufacturing in an International Production Enviroment

Rapid Response Manufacturing in RIO South Texas Region

Opening Session 6.3, Miguel Gonzalez, Jianzhi Li and Douglas Timmer (University of Texas-Pan American) will speak about their experiences with rapid response manufacturing techniques in their home region of South Texas.

Experiences in Disburse Engineering Design Education Targeted on Rapid Innovation & Manufacturing

In this part Jianzhi Li, John Lloyd, Miguel Gonzalez, Douglas Timmer (University of Texas-Pan American) will share some of their experiences on the topic of disburse engineering design education with a special focus on its application in rapid innovation and manufacturing.

Information Technology Suitability Index for Mass Customization

In their presentation, Douglas Timmer and Miguel Gonzalez ( University of Texas-Pan American) will discuss the suitability of information technology in regards of mass customization.

Case Studies of Rapid Response Manufacturing in an International Production System

As a response to intensified competition, changing customer needs and greatly shortened product life cycles, ALPS as a global parts supplier to major automakers has been implementing rapid response manufacturing and mass customization technologies in order to capture and satisfy customer requirements in a timely and efficient manner.

In their presentation, Edi Sanjoto (ALPS Automotive) and Miguel Gonzalez (University of Texas-Pan American) will introduce best practices and strategies which allowed ALPS to connect with customers effectively and to quickly identify product variations. Furthermore they will compare different configurations of manufacturing lines with mass customization in mind, based on which they will give their recommendations for rapid response manufacturing strategies.

Reconfigurable Strategies to Hammer Open Innovation Concepts into the Mass Customized Automobile Manufacturing

The manufacturing industry in general and the automotive industry in particular is distinguished by rapid globalization, high mass customization, regionalization, value chain restructuring and reduced product as well as innovation life cycles. This in turn has compelled the automotive manufacturers to open up their innovation process to better address the customer needs readily by exploiting efficient outsourcing strategies.

Sarfraz Minhas, Ulrich Berger and Christiane Hipp (Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus) will discuss the need for reconfigurable approaches in planning as well as in control to address mass- customization-induced complexities under the umbrella of open innovation. A reconfigurable production control will be proposed in the body-in-white production, encompassing the configuration of specific setups to enable co-development in a distributed production environment, exploiting ICT technologies to produce mass customized products.

Innovations in Mechatronic Products and Mass Customization

Mass Customization has been recognized as a successful strategy in the design and development of products tailored to customer needs. Global competition demands new products with added functionalities, as in the case of mechatronic products.  These products are becoming more and more important as a product type and new inventions have resulted in drastic changes in design and development of mechatronic products, both standalone and enhancing conventional mechanical systems.

In this part, Tufail Habib, Kaj Jörgensen and Kjeld Nielsen (Aalborg University) will present the particular structure and properties of mechatronic products compared to conventional mechanical systems.Following that they will give an overview of typical changes regarding functionalities from mechanical products towards mechatronic products.

Utilising Mass Customisation Methods for Modular ManufacturingSystem Design

In order to operate under and take advantage of the specific dynamics of today's markets, manufacturing processes have to be robust to product changes – a contradiction to traditional manufacturing systems developed as dedicated engineer-to-order solutions, tailored to production of a specific product or a limited product assortment. In response, modular manufacturing concepts are evolving, designed with the needed responsiveness in mind, being the manufacturing paradigm of Mass Customisation.

Research focus has been on the basic principles and enabling technologies, while modular architectures and system design have received less attention. A potential to fill these gaps by applying selected design theories and methods of MC has been identified. Based on a communality analysis between these theories/methods and the modular manufacturing approach, Steffen Joergensen, Alexia Jacobsen, Kjeld Nielsen, Ole Madsen and Kaj Jörgensen (Aalborg University) will discuss and evaluate the potentials and show possible obstacles of application.

Listen to the full content of these talks at the MCPC 2011, Marriot SFO Airport, San Francisco, Nov 16-19, 2011:

- Conference Website and Registration

- All info here in one compact MCPC flyer

- Conference hotel and travel (rooms fill quickly, book now!)

- All posts about the conference in my blog

Executive Seminare an der RWTH Aachen zu Open Innovation und Social Media Strategy

I'am glad to be able two more seminars as part of the open executive education program of RWTH Aachen University. The seminar language, however, is GERMAN -- hence, the following posting is in German language, too.

Zusammen mit der RWTH International Academy haben wir unser Seminarangebot für Führungskräfte an der RWTH Aachen stark ausgebaut. Ich darf Sie zu zwei Seminaren einladen, die unter meiner Leitung im 4. Quartal 2011 in Aachen stattfinden:

Social Media Strategy (13-14. Okt.): Zusammen mit meinem Kollegen Prof. Detlef Schoder, Leiter der Wirtschaftsinformatik an der Uni Köln und ein führender Forscher (und zugleich erfolgreicher Unternehmer) im Bereich Social Media bieten wir eine strategische Einführung in das Themenfeld Social Media. Dabei geht es weniger um operative Aspekte der Umsetzung als vielmehr um strategische Fragen und eine Orientierung in diesem Themenfeld für das Management. Einen besonderen Schwerpunkt wird hier auch die Innovation spielen  –  Stichwort "Social Product Development". Mehr information zum Seminar hier.

Open Innovation umsetzen (20.-21. Okt.): Open Innovation ist dem Status des Buzzwords entwachsen, und viele Unternehmen haben intensive Pilotierungen abgeschlossen. Doch wie wird Open Innovation in das Innovationsmanagement integriert, welche Anforderungen gibt es an die Organisation? Wie messen Sie die "Open Innovation Readiness" Ihres Unternehmens? Darüber hinaus gibt der Kurs aber auch eine intensive Einführung in die verschiedenen Methoden von Open Innovation und Co-Creation.Mehr Inforation zu diesem Seminar hier.

Übrigens: Beide Kurse bieten wir auch im Rahmen von "Customized Education" auf Ihre Bedürfnisse zugeschnitten als Inhouse-Seminar an.  Weitere Informationen dazu gerne!

Ich würde mich freuen, Sie bei einer der Veranstaltungen in Aachen begrüßen zu dürfen!

Quirky in Numbers: Entrepreneur Magazine shares new data on Quirky's social product development business model

In the August issue of Entrepreneur, Jennifer Wang has a great story on Quirky, featuring the person of founder Ben Kaufman (everyone attending the MIT SCG Seminar in 2010 still remembers his presentation), but also sharing some great info on the company.

Read the full article here, but here are some of the facts I found most interesting:

Old world: If you have an idea and want to turn it into a product "Kaufman puts the upfront costs of building a company around a single product at about $200,000--just to get the paperwork done and the first prototype out." Combined with the risk, most people never get their product idea anywhere near retail shelves.

Quirky's approach:

Create an online community of 65,000 members (growing by 20 percent every month).

Have "every week hundreds of inventor hopefuls, or "ideators," submit their concepts online".

So called "influencers" than vote on the ideas and develop them further, together with Quirky's inhouse design team.

Requirement: Product ideas must retail for less than $150 and should not require integrated software.

Examples of products in the making and development: "an auto-stirring microwavable bowl with steam-release function; a modular tent-making kit for use with couch cushions and throw quilts; a yoga mat with magnetic or Velcro closures."

30% payoff: "Thirty cents of every revenue dollar goes back to ideators, and a number of them have already earned tens of thousands of dollars."

Typical income of inventors:

Michael McCoy, inventor of Cloak, a two-in-one iPad stand and case, that retails for $29.99. This item generated total sales of $100,128, and Michael got a share of $38,007 for this.

Jake Zien, inventor of the Pivot Power, an adjustable power strip with six outlets, that retails for $29.99. This item generated total sales: $13,021, and Jake got a share of $4,919.

Quirky's take: "The company retains the rights to all the cool ideas that are voted into the development process, and because the company gets validation from thousands of potential customers before making a move, Kaufman avoids all the costs associated with early design phases." => our idea of collective customer commitment at its best!

2011 revenue: Expected "to be between $6 million and $10 million"

Financing: Quirky has raised $12.6 million in funding.

Staff: Today 40, planned are about 80 by the end of this year.

Media: Ben is a master in self promotion and announcing his company, and so the Sundance Channel's will have a reality TV show featuring Kaufman, Quirky employees, the inventors and their stories, premiering in August.

Ben's core learning in running an online community:

"Face-time is important, transparency is important!" There's a whole department dedicated to "inventor services," and the company regularly holds virtual town hall meetings with the whole staff, inviting community members to log on and ask anyone on the team questions."

 For me, Quirky still is one of the best ideas of co-creation. Here is my earlier more extended analysis of their business model.

 

User innovation and co-creation are taking over the world -- recent articles in The New York Times and The Economist

In the last few days, two of the leading global media outlets, The New York Times and The Economist, had quite extensive articles on user innovation, customization, and co-creation.

On February 10, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition of The New York Times, Patricia Cohen writes about "Innovation Far Removed From the Lab",

The article is a great praise and acknowledgment of the work done by Eric von Hippel: Here are some quotes from the article I liked most:

"[...] Since the Austrian economist Joseph A. Schumpeter published “The Theory of Economic Development” in 1934, economists and governments have assumed that the industrial and business sectors are where ideas for products originate. A complex net of laws and policies, from intellectual property rights to producer subsidies and tax benefits, have flowed from this basic assumption.

However, pathbreaking research by a group of scholars including Eric A. von Hippel, a professor of technological innovation at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, suggests that the traditional division of labor between innovators and customers is breaking down.  [...]

Financed by the British government, Mr. von Hippel and his colleagues last year completed the first representative large-scale survey of consumer innovation ever conducted.

What the team discovered ... was that the amount of money individual consumers spent making and improving products was more than twice as large as the amount spent by all British firms combined on product research and development over a three-year period.

[...]  Carliss Y. Baldwin, a business administration professor at the Harvard Business School, called the research remarkable, adding: “What makes Eric’s work so significant is that it is unprecedented to try to measure the extent of user innovation. He shows that we’ve had on a set of mental blinders.”

This is the UK study the NYT is referring to is: Von Hippel, Eric A., De Jong, Jeroen and Flowers, Steven, Comparing Business and Household Sector Innovation in Consumer Products: Findings from a Representative Study in the UK (September 27, 2010). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1683503

The Economist takes on another aspect that somehow is complementing user innovation: Fabbing and the rise of additive manufacturing technologies for the average consumer.

In the Technology section of the Feb 10th 2011 print edition, the article "Print me a Stradivarius: How a new manufacturing technology will change the world" reviews the recent developments of aditive manufactuing and what this means for the world of manufacturing. Nothing less than a revolution, the Economist suggests.

Again some quotes from the article:

"[...] By reducing the barriers to entry for manufacturing, 3D printing should also promote innovation. If you can design a shape on a computer, you can turn it into an object. You can print a dozen, see if there is a market for them, and print 50 more if there is, modifying the design using feedback from early users. This will be a boon to inventors and start-ups, because trying out new products will become less risky and expensive. And just as open-source programmers collaborate by sharing software code, engineers are already starting to collaborate on open-source designs for objects and hardware.

A technological change so profound will reset the economics of manufacturing. Some believe it will decentralise the business completely, reversing the urbanisation that accompanies industrialisation. There will be no need for factories, goes the logic, when every village has a fabricator that can produce items when needed. Up to a point, perhaps. But the economic and social benefits of cities go far beyond their ability to attract workers to man assembly lines. [...]

Just as nobody could have predicted the impact of the steam engine in 1750—or the printing press in 1450, or the transistor in 1950—it is impossible to foresee the long-term impact of 3D printing. But the technology is coming, and it is likely to disrupt every field it touches. Companies, regulators and entrepreneurs should start thinking about it now. One thing, at least, seems clear: although 3D printing will create winners and losers in the short term, in the long run it will expand the realm of industry—and imagination."

Both articles also show why the new "Open Source Hardware" definition is so important: It will become the intellectual underpinning of user innovators using the new fabbing technologies to produce -- and distribute -- the next wave of innovation collaboratively.

Open Source Hardware (OSHW) Definition v1.0 Released: What it is and how it will change innovation

Open Source Hardware finally has an official definition. Today, the "Open Source Hardware (OSHW) Statement of Principles and Definition v1.0" has been published.

Open Source Hardware (OSHW) is a term for tangible artifacts -- machines, devices, or other physical things -- whose design has been released to the public in such a way that anyone can make, modify, distribute, and use those things. The basic motivation of OSHW is to give people "the freedom to control their technology while sharing knowledge and encouraging commerce through the open exchange of designs." (Note the explicit relation to "commerce", as this is as much to act as an economic principle as it is one of knowledge management and enabling innovation).

Last year, I participated at the "Open Hardware Summit" in New York city, a large gathering of people interested in bringing the open source software idea to hardware products.The participants of the Summit were a very interesting and eclectic crowd, starting a really great debate on the opportunities, but also the challenges of OSHW (obviously, the opportunities won).

As a core result of the debate started at the summit, today finally the official version of the "Open Source Hardware (OSHW) Statement of Principles and Definition v1.0" has been published. This publication can be seen as profound and game-changing as the original "Open Source Definition," created by Bruce Perens and the Debian developers as the "Debian Free Software Guidelines" in 1997.

In the first official open hardware definition, OSHW is defined as

"hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design. The hardware's source, the design from which it is made, is available in the preferred format for making modifications to it.

Ideally, open source hardware uses readily-available components and materials, standard processes, open infrastructure, unrestricted content, and open-source design tools to maximize the ability of individuals to make and use hardware."

The definition then states 12 criteria that characterize OSHW, among them the following:

1. Documentation: hardware must be released with documentation including design files, and must allow modification and distribution of the design files.

3. Necessary Software: If the design requires software then the license may require that this software may not constrain the open design of the hardware.

4. Derived Works: The license shall allow modifications and derived works, and shall allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original work.

5. Free redistribution: The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the project documentation, but also shall not demand a fee for this.

8. No Discrimination against Fields of Endeavor ("... For example, it must not restrict the hardware from being used in a business, or from being used in nuclear research.").

12. License Must Be Technology-Neutral.

I believe that the publishing of this definition could have an equally, of even wider, impact as the OSS movement. While not all hardware will be open, working on a license that allows hardware products to be designed, produced, and reproduced under these rules may start a new manufacturing movement that may change the way how products are designed and distributed (if only engineering students would have good and up-to-date mandatory classes in law and IP – as this is not the case it are the economists and management professors like me that care about the things while the average engineering student is being educated in a traditional way of IP and patents).

OSHW is exactly one of the interfaces between customization and open innovation that we want to discuss in larger detail during the MCPC 2011 conference in San Francisco in Nov 2011.

 

The Ponoko-Google Challenge: Show the World How Easy It Is to Manufacture What You Like

If have written several times about Ponoko here, a platform where designers, users, and manufacturers meet and enable to production of cool items in a very democratic way. It allows you to turn the stuff you dream up into physical objects that you can hold in your hands.  "User manufactuing" at its best!

Ponoko now has teamed up with Google in a user contest to get people educated about the opportunities available for anyone to design things and turn them into real products -- without the help of any "large" company! With Ponoko's new "Personal Factory 4", the process got even easier.

The Google-Ponoko challenge is to produce a piece of instructional content that’s equal parts enlightening and entertaining. Each entry must be titled “How to use Google SketchUp for Ponoko 3D printing,” but aside from that, the format is pretty open. Text, images and video (or some combination of the three) are all fair game.

The competition deadline is four weeks from now; all entries are due December 17, 2010. Visit the official announcement page for all the details, and have fun making the world a more interesting place to be.

Ponoko opens manufacturing network hub in Germany. First step to original "mini factory" network idea

A few days ago, Derek Elley from Ponoko gave me the good news that Ponoko has finally signed up a network partner in Europe.

I wrote about Ponoko several times. It is an online marketplace for everyone to make real things. Just like eBay provides the marketplace for buyers and sellers to engage, Ponoko provides the marketplace for buyers and sellers of product designs and digital making services. More than 40,000 user-generated designs have been instantly priced online, made and delivered since Ponoko launched in late 2007. It is a perfect illustration of the "user manufacturing" economy that Chirs Anderson features in the recent WIRED title story.

A core idea of Ponoko is that they want to connect a network of independent "mini factories" where the digital creations of users are turned in the moment. For a long time, this vision only worked with the two making hubs owned by Ponoko in in San Francisco, California and Wellington, New Zealand. But now, the first independent network hub has opened -- and I am please to notice that it is in Germany.

Here, Ponoko now has partnered with fabber Formulor to open a making hub in Berlin. It means EU-based creators using the Ponoko online making system can now choose to have their products made in Berlin – paying just a fraction of the shipping costs which has made ordering products from Ponoko’s US and Pacific-based making hubs prohibitive.

The development also opens up the European market for creators around the world. Items can now be produced in the EU and shipped locally.

“It provides a glimpse into what we see as the future of Ponoko,” Ponoko CEO David ten Have  is quoted in a press announcement, “Over time we see our role expanding to be about connecting creators, digital fabricators, materials suppliers and buyers of goods rather than simply providing manufacturing services ourselves. So just like eBay provides the marketplace for buyers and sellers to engage, Ponoko provides the world’s first marketplace for buyers and sellers of product designs – and now digital making services.”

Ponoko is working with other digital making service providers to add more making hubs around the world.

The big question, however, is: Is this development particularly relevant given HP is now selling 3D printers and you can have your own manufacturing hub in your home?

Yes, I will argue.

• Shipping costs between the US and EU are reduced from $60 to $9 for for smaller goods -- so before you buy your own 3D printer, you can first try it out and get experience.
• US creators (like ESTY and Adobe users) can ship their products to EU customers at 85% less cost, and with less environmental impact.
• And the quality of home 3D printing and cutting may still be inferior to producing your stuff at a professional outlet.

But this is a very interesting question for research, one for which I hopefully will find time to think about more in the next months: When will you produce at home, when use a mini factory hub like Ponoko, and when just buy a standard product from your local superstore.

Distributed user manufacturing network started: Ponoko and ShopBot announce partnership to provide users access to over 6,000 digital fabricators around the world

During the 2007 US Presidential debates, journalist Tom Brokaw asked candidates Obama and McCain whether our challenges would be best solved by ... "funding a Manhattan-style project or by supporting 100,000 garages across America to encourage the kind of industry and innovation that developed Silicon Valley?"

A new website takes the second approach! Inspired by Tom Brokaw's question to the presidential candidates, 100Kgarages is a community of workshops all over the world that are run by "Fabbers", with digital fabrication tools for precisely cutting, machining, drilling, or sculpting the components of any user  project.

The site has been launched on Sept. 16 by Ponoko and ShopBot, expanding the opportunities for ordinary users to get almost anything custom made and delivered from local state-of-the-art digital makers.

I have written several times about Ponoko in my blog, an online marketplace for everyone to make real things. It brings together creators, digital fabricators, materials suppliers and buyers. Since its launch in 2007, more than 30,000 user-generated designs "have been instantly priced online" (the official wording in the press release, I believe this means "uploaded and finished", but not ordered and delivered).

ShopBot is a manufacturer of affordable, high-performance CNC tools for digital fabrication of wood, plastic and aluminum products. With more than 6,000 ShopBots in thousands of shops in the US and 54 countries around the world, ShopBot is one of the largest producers of CNC routers in North America.

With the cooperation of the both companies and the launch of the 100kGarages website, anyone can get their ideas made locally with the click of a mouse, and delivered within just a few days.

Users can go to the site to get things custom made by searching a map for a local garage workshop, or submitting a request and choosing from bids placed by a range of ShopBot owners to make almost anything. It’s free for everyone to search and submit requests, and for fabricators to post profiles and bids.

People are creating a wide range of products like tables, chairs, cabinets, car parts, signage, boats, musical instruments, gaskets, sheds, housing and all of those impossible to find things made from wood, plastic, metal and composite materials.

“Our partnership means everyone now has easy access to their own local 3D fabricator. This is the first step to providing a solution for the doers and makers out there who want to join in re-building America, one garage at a time.”, says ShopBot’s President Ted Hall in the press release.

In the moment, the site still looks a bit beta, but it is a great starting point and another sign of the coming age of user manufacturing.

(Updated) Will New Coca-Cola Vending Machine Allow Ultimate Customization at the Point-of-Sale?

Update: Coca Cola just contacted me and revealed the brand name for this venture: Coca Cola Freestyle(TM), see press release below!

Finally a concept could become reality that Joe Pine has described more than 16 years ago (as a future dream scenario) in his book "Mass Customization": The ultimate soda fountain that offers unlimited choice, as Owen Morris in a newspaper article and Tim Stevens in Engadget.com report. (Note: I could not get more information about this concept. But if you know more, please drop me a line as I am very interested in these kind of localized customization devices).

 Currently, your typical soda fountain in a fast-food joint features perhaps eight to ten standard choices, usually offering nothing more exotic than "peach flavored ice tea." These machines work through syrup bags. The restaurant buys a bag from Coke or Pepsi, hooks it up to a soda (water) line and then the fountain combines the carbonated water with the syrup to create your soda. The machines are limited by soda lines, which tend to gunk up with sugar mold, and by bulky soda bags that weigh 30 pounds or more.

The new Coke machine is completely different. Coca-Cola has announced a new soda fountain that can hold more than 100 sodas. That's ten times more than current soda fountains.

The new fountain is like an ink printer with space for hundreds of cartridges. Each cartridge contains a concentrated formula of ingredients. When you press your choice, say Diet Coke, the machine will tell cartridge 12 to release three squirts, cartridge 81 two squirts and so on, then it combines it with carbonated water and you get the same drink as old machines.

But: The new fountains can hold a lot more of these little cartridges, so they can handle a lot more flavors. Coca-Cola promises 120 different drinks, but there could be even more as the technology gets better and the company gets more confident. You think these are way to many choices for a standard drink like sodas? Think again; Already today, Coca-Cola is listing more than 2,800 beverages on their website! And I personally would love to have a German "Apfelschorle" with still water and a 20:80 mix of juice to water … something even waiters have a problem to bring in a restaurant.

The first new fountains are rolling out in Atlanta and California in this spring. Assuming tests there go well and the public loves its overwhelming choices, the new fountains would come to other US cities next year.

But there may be a downside: How will Coke protects its customers from the paradox of choice, when too many options overwhelm our brains and shuts them down from making a decision. Just think of the lines as "the thirsty yet indecisive ponder 15 different flavors of Diet Coke?" (Tim Stevens).

---

Update: Press release from The Coca Cola Company on April 28, 2009:

THE COCA-COLA COMPANY INVITES CONSUMERS TO EXPERIENCE “FREESTYLE”
New Proprietary Fountain Dispenser Gets a Brand Name

ATLANTA, Apr. 28, 2009 – The next generation fountain beverage dispenser has a “stylish” new name.

North America today revealed that “Coca-Cola Freestyle TM” is the brand name and logo for its new proprietary fountain dispenser entering market testing this summer.  The fountain’s brand name captures its ability to deliver unprecedented beverage variety to suit any consumer taste – all packaged in an innovative and interactive fountain experience. 

“Coca-Cola Freestyle brings to life the refreshingly positive outlook that has always been associated with Coca-Cola,” said Chandra Stephens-Albright, Group Director of Marketing and Business Development for the brand. 

“It brings back the magic of the fountain of the past, re-imagines it for the future and then takes it a step farther by celebrating the idea that consumers can truly have their say at fountain – with choices tailored completely for them.”

The new self-serve fountains – which represent a complete departure from equipment The Coca-Cola Company has offered before – have been in development for nearly four years.  The sleek new units being tested are touch screen operated, enabling consumers to select from more than 100 calorie and no-calorie brands – including varieties of waters, juices, teas and sparkling beverages that have never been sold in the United States.

The Coca-Cola Freestyle dispenser uses proprietary PurePour Technology™ to make dozens of branded beverages fresh to order, in the same amount of space as the current eight-valve machine.  It will be tested in select quick-serve restaurants in Orange County, Calif., and Atlanta this summer before a wider introduction currently planned for early next year.

Democratization of Manufacturing: Great Article in ASME's "Mechanical Engineering" Journal

In the recent issue of Mechanical Engineering (April 2009), the journal of the powerful American Society of Mechanical Engineering , Associate Editor Jean Thilmany has published a great article on mass customization. His conclusion: Mass customization is part-way here; when the rest will arrive is anyone’s guess.

The article provides a great comparison of traditional consumer-co-design driven mass customization (you designing your shirt in an online-configurator), traditional engineer-to-order and small-batch production, and the new opportunities provided by 3D printing and rapid manufacturing.

As Thilmany observes in the article:

"Pine’s definition [of mass customization] can get a bit muddled, what with the growth of rapid prototyping and related technologies such as 3-D printing. Is a rapid prototype an instance of mass customization? Does an object printed on a 3-D printer qualify?

If the printed piece is meant to be used as an end product—not a prototype—it’s an example of a mass customized product, Pine said.

“I always believe words have meaning,” he said. “It’s called rapid prototyping because you’re making a prototype.”

But say you design an object using an online service like Shapeways of Eindhoven, the Netherlands? That company allows you to upload your own 3-D models. Shapeways prints your object on a 3-D printer and sends it to you. You’ve created your own custom product, Pine said."

But what is the future of mass customization?

Donal Reddington, who runs the Web site MadeForOne.com, is quoted in the article on this:

"So far mass customization—of varying degrees—has supplemented mass production, Reddington said.  So why, in this age of the Internet, hasn’t it come closer to replacing mass production in both the retail and engineering sectors?

“The consumer society is very much based on the idea of gratification. I walk into a shop, see something I like, and walk out with a sense of satisfaction at having bought it,” Reddington said.

“But the predominant mass customization business model that’s gained root since the mid-1990s is the online model, which provided customers with the facility to go online and configure the product, order it, and get exactly what they wanted delivered after one week. Or maybe two or three weeks,” he added.

And where will this lead to?

Despite the impediments to adoption, all the experts interviewed expect mass customization to grow.
“Going into the future, the Internet will facilitate a new wave of mass customization, where customers will create and trade designs for physical products in the same way they trade music files,” Reddington said.  

And not only will consumers find ever-more Internet-based design tools at their disposal, they’ll continue to see advances in the capability to build their own products to their specifications, Piller said.

For the full article, available for free online, head to:
http://memagazine.asme.org/Articles/2009/April/Democratization_Manufacturing.cfm

Interview: The Next Generation of Architectural Design: Daniel Smithwick from Physical Design Co on a great way to build the garden house of your dream … and much more

Daniel Smithwick is the co-founder and CEO of Physical Design Co., a Cambridge, MA, startup that wants to start a revolution in building structures. His vision: To empower every consumer to transform nearly any custom design into easily assembled physical structures delivered to your backyard! This could be your next garden house project. Before, you either had to purchase an expensive standard house at Home Depot that was not only labor intensive to assemble, but often ugly and not fitting exactly your requirements. Or you could get your hands dirty and start a complicated DIY project, constructing it with 2x4s and nails. As a last alternative, you could hire a contractor to build you your dream house … but this comes with a heavy price tag and often delays of the construction crew.

Daniel wants to offer another alternative: You design your dream in SketchUp, the free CAD software by Google, and his company will translate your uploaded design in a custom kit of interlocking CNC-cut parts that you can then easily assemble after delivery. His promise: "With Physical Design Co Web Platform anyone can design, remotely manage production, and assemble their own full-scale inhabitable creations!"

In an interview, Daniel shared more information about his project and company and what he regards as the future of mass customization.

Daniel Smithwick is an architectural designer by training and he is currently a graduate researcher at MIT where he is a member of the Smart Customization Group and the Digital Design and Fabrication Group.  Daniel co-lead the latest research project by the Digital Design and Fabrication Group called, “Digitally Fabricated Housing for New Orleans,” a project commissioned by and exhibited at the MoMA in New York for their 2008 show, Home Delivery, Fabricating the Modern Dwelling.  Before coming to MIT, Daniel worked professionally as a designer for leading architecture and design firms including: Pompei Architectural Design in NYC, Loom Architects in Minneapolis, MN, and Howeler + Yoon Architecture in Boston.

FTP: Daniel, what is the idea behind your startup, Physical Design Co?

DS: The central idea behind Physical Design Co. is to provide consumers with easy-to-use online tools that engage them in the design and manufacturing process and enables them to become the producers of their own architectural-scale designs.  Our web platform also allows consumers to utilize local manufacturing via our distributed fabrication network which not only reduces carbon emissions, but it also strengthens local economies.  Essentially, we’re re-thinking how our built environment is designed and constructed – with the Physical Design Co, online users, whether they live in rural China, or they are busy professionals interested in design, they can now play an active and participatory role in the built world around them.  

Through our web platform, anyone can upload and transform their digital design – any inhabitable accessory structure, from doghouses to backyard art studios - into a customized kit of interlocking parts that are locally manufactured and that can be easily assembled.  Consumers no longer need to rely on the traditional labor-intensive and wasteful construction process: with the Physical Design Co all you need is a rubber mallet to assemble your creation.

FTP: How is this different to existing companies in the field like Ponoko, Replicator or Shapeways?

DS: The Physical Design Co distinguishes itself in two ways. First, we provide consumers with the ability to custom design, and have fabricated, life-size and inhabitable scale structures, as opposed to only hand-held items like fashion accessories and table-top objects.  We’re interested in offering consumers more than just personalization; our web platform engages the consumer in the design, manufacturing and delivery process – giving them the tools to make smarter decisions about how they impact the built and natural environment.

Second, we have developed a patent-pending technology which automatically translates the user’s design into a unique kit of interlocking, easy-to-assemble parts.  For example, let’s say you wanted to design a backyard shed.  Instead of having to digitally model all of the individual parts, consider how they all attached together, worry about the structural integrity and verify that it is indeed possible to put it all together, with the Physical Design Co., all you have to do is model the shape of your design.  Our technology automatically and digitally translates the design shape into a kit-of-parts that can then be CNC fabricated and subsequently interlock together without the need for nails, screws or any additional hardware.  

FTP: Dan, you recently presented your company and some creations at the Maker Faire of MAKE magazine, a large gathering of hardware hackers and DIY enthusiasts in Austin, TX. Can tell us some more about this exhibition and the feedback you received?

DS: In October of 2008 the Physical Design Co., in collaboration with ShopBot Tools (an innovative manufacturer of user-friendly CNC machines) designed, fabricated and exhibited the ‘Austin Shed’ for the Maker Faire in Austin, TX.  This is the world’s first digitally fabricated shed.

The feedback we received from the Maker Faire attendees was incredible.  Most were simply amazed at how structurally strong the shed was without any nails, screws or hardware holding it together.  However, the most rewarding feedback we received was from children.  At the faire, we pulled a few of the ‘skin’ panels off to reveal the grid structure of the interlocking ribs so that visitors could understand how it was assembled.  What surprised us was that 10 year-old kids would pick up the removed parts and correctly replace them back on the shed without any knowledge of how the system worked.  We were delighted to find that our assembly process is intuitive enough that children could put it together!

FTP: How do you master the manufacturing process; who are your cooperation partners?

DS: The great thing about the Physical Design Co and our manufacturing process is that we don’t need to build any new large and energy-inefficient factories to produce our users’ designs.  In fact, the manufacturing infrastructure already exists worldwide – it’s the tens of thousands of individual CNC owners around the world whose machines are online.  These are our cooperation partners.

Through our web platform, these CNC owners become members of our distributed manufacturing network through which they can promote their existing and on-going services.  This is how we enable the users and designers on our web platform to have their structures locally manufactured - which greatly reduces delivery costs both in terms of money and energy use. 

FTP: What are the next steps for your company, and how do you expect to grow it in the coming months?

DS: This summer, in collaboration with ShopBot Tools, Make Magazine and Google SketchUp we’re hosting a competition called the Get Physical! Design Competition which will take place at the Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA.  The top 3 winners will have their designs digitally fabricated using our web platform, assembled and showcased at the upcoming Maker Faire.  Keep an eye on our blog for more details over the next couple of months.

FTP: What are other trends you see with regard to mass customization?

DS: When answering this question I like to quote Eric von Hippel from his book, Democratizing Innovation:

“When the cost of high-quality resources for design and prototyping becomes very low, these resources can be diffused widely, and the allocation problem diminishes in significance.  The net result is and will be to democratize the opportunity to create.”

I think we’ll continue to see an increase in user-engagement not only in the design process but also in the production process of our built environment as the availability of digital fabrication equipment exponentially grows.  In addition I think we’re just beginning to understand the power of online user communities and crowd-sourcing.  Rather than just offering product mass customization to isolated individual users, we are starting to see that by enabling them to interact with each other through a web platform, their collective intelligence is boundless.

For more information, contact Daniel at [email protected]
http://www.physicaldesignco.com/
http://www.physicaldesignco.com/blog/

New toolkit for 3D printing: Turn digital pictures into 3D art

I previously reported several times about Shapeways, a spinn-off from the Lifestyle Incubator of Royal Philips Electronics, located in Eindhoven, Netherlands. The company provides 3D-printing capabilities to everyone.

Part of their mission is to provide users a set of toolkits that allow also the average consumer to create 3D objects without any CAD or programming skills. Today, Shapeways has introduced their so called "Photoshaper", a service that allows anyone to turn digital photographs into 3D printed objects.

Users can logon to Shapeways.com, upload any photo and order their creations directly from Shapeways. Now you not only can see your girl friend in your wallet when you are on a business trip, but touch her in 3D!

“Shapeways really makes 3D creation fun, easy and available for everyone,” commented Peter Weijmarshausen, CEO of Shapeways is quoted in a press release. “With Photoshaper we have empowered the average consumer to tap into technologies that used to be out of reach. In doing so Shapeways redefines online consumerism with direct access to unique and individually customized products that were never available before.”

Based on the contrast of the picture (light and dark) the Shapeways Photoshaper automatically creates a depth-layered 3D object that can be printed by Shapeways with the latest in 3D printing technology (I believe with a little bit of photoshopping before uploading the pictures, results can be improved a lot). The 3D photo will be produced and delivered globally within 10 days and costs between $40-50 (USD), including shipping. For best results. use a 1.5 megapixel or better picture. The size of the 3D photo is 13cm to 9cm (5.11” to 3.5”) landscape and portrait.

Context:

• Shapeways Photoshaper is available at: http://www.shapeways.com/creator/photoshaper
• Previous report about Shapeways: 3D Merchandising Platform

Term Wars: 3D-Printing, Additive Fabrication, Fabbing, Rapid Manufacturing, Layered Manufacturing

In an interesting contribution to the "Rapid Prototyping mailing list" (rapid.lpt.fi), Terry Wohlers, CEO of Wohlers Associates, Inc., a technology consultancy, comments on the difficulties to find an appropriate term for a technology that has been covered often in this blog, as it is a key enabler of both mass customization and new forms of user innovation.

This technology refers to the group of processes that builds parts layer by layer direct from 3D data, without the need for tools or molds. Terry, who prefers the name additive fabrication, describes these technologies as follows on his web site:

Additive fabrication (AF) refers to a group of technologies used for building physical models, prototypes, tooling components, and even finished series production parts—all from 3D computer-aided design (CAD) data, medical scans, or data from 3D scanning systems. Unlike CNC machines, which are subtractive in nature, AF systems join together liquid, powder, or sheet materials to form parts that may be impossible to fabricate by any other method. Based on thin horizontal cross sections taken from a 3D computer model, AF machines produce plastic, metal, ceramic, or composite parts, layer upon layer.

I previously used the term "rapid manufacturing" for these technologies. This term should show the evolution from "rapid prototyping". For many years, AF technologies have been used in most cases to quickly build a prototype during a new product development process. Today, however, prototyping is only one of many applications for these technologies. In his posting to the mailing list, Terry discusses what the best term is – and concludes that it should be "3D-Printing". Here are some excerpts (in rearranged order):

AF processes are being used for a range of applications including concept design and modeling, fit and function testing, patterns for castings, and mold and die tooling. They are also used for fixture and assembly tools, custom and replacement part manufacturing, special edition products, short-run production, and series manufacturing. Prototyping is one of many applications and that's why "RP" is no longer suitable in most instances as a catch-all term. In fact, many companies resist the idea of using a prototyping method for part manufacturing, so using this term could stifle AF's transition to manufacturing applications.

This may be the reason why he also resists to the term "rapid manufacturing" (and, when reading his comments, I also agree that this term is not precise enough, as also a good old injecting molding process is very "rapid"! The term also has been used for very different manufacturing concepts). EOS has been proposing the term "e-manufacturing" to focus on the fact that the parts are produced directly from 3D-data. But also a CNC machine is doing so.

... A growing number of people are using terms such as "additive fabrication" or "additive manufacturing" ...  The mainstream press -- when our industry is lucky enough to get included in it -- uses "3D printing" most frequently. Among industry insiders, 3D printing refers to a group of AF processes that are relatively low cost, easy to use, and office friendly ...

The term "additive manufacturing" is fine, although because manufacturing is an application and not a technology, I believe it is plagued with problems, similar to "rapid prototyping." Consider, for example, this sentence: "My company is using additive manufacturing for manufacturing." It's confusing. Now, consider this: "My company is using solid freeform fabrication for manufacturing." Much cleaner.

I'm not suggesting that we use "solid freeform fabrication;" I'm using it here to illustrate a point. I believe it works much better when the catch-all term does not include the name of an application. That way it can be used cleanly for all applications of the technology.
 
Since 2005 I've used the catch-all term "additive fabrication" in our company's publications, presentations, and communications. It's not perfect, but it works. In the future, I truly believe that "3D printing" will become the most popular term. When I'm describing AF technology to ... someone I'm seated next to on an airplane, I use 3D printing because there's a better chance that he/she will understand what I'm saying. It's simple and easy to say. I prefer it over alternatives, but 3D printing currently means something else to many people in our industry.

This is likely to change. An estimated 74% of all systems sold in 2007 were classified as a 3D printer and each year this percentage increases.

I believe these comments make a lot of sense. I cannot promise that I will not any longer use "rapid manufacturing", but I think that "3D printing" (in a non expert environment) and additive fabrication in a technical context are very good terms to describe where I am excited about. And fabbing is nice jargon when you want to refer to additive fabrication and stay cool.

And Google is confirming this claim. Here are the number of hits when you search for the terms:

3D printing 7,930,000
Rapid manufacturing 567,000
Additive fabrication 441,00
Fabbing 88,000
Layered fabrication 36,400

Rapid Prototyping: 1,620,000

This said, however, an important disclaimer: I do not think that these new technologies will solve all problems of MC manufacturing or become the dominant fabrication technologies. For rather a long time, they will remain niche technologies, and low-cost or advanced subtractive technologies like laser cutting or CNC machines still provide plenty of great opportunities for customized manufacturing.

Angel Yourself - Print Yourself in 3D This (Well, Next) Christmas

Yes, this posting is late, too late. It may have saved your day and really provided you with the ultimate Christmas surprise. But I messed this up and posted this much too late. Sorry! However, just imagine a world (comimg soon) where everyone has a 3D printer at their home. Then you actually could DO this now in time for Christmas Eve what now you only can do for the next year ....

 Anyhow, this is what you could have done in time for this Christmas:

Tons of goods are being personalized this Christmas. While there are many companies do personalized gifts, JuJups is taking this to the extreme – a personalized gift of the person itself! JuJups, a Singapore based user manufacturing workshop, launched a new "Print your self into an angel" product. On their website, you can upload your portrait photo of your family and friends (and even yourself) which then be printed as cute figurine ornament.  JuJups' on demand figurine ornaments are made as you order with special 3D printing technology. Currently JuJups has an Angel, Santa and Elf figurine.

JuJups is a rapidly growing online co-creation platform that connects prosumers, content owners and manufacturing companies globally, to serve customers locally. JuJups is owned and operated by Genometri. Genometri is a Design Technology Company based in Singapore focusing on building tools for co-creation. It is funded by NVS and SPRING Singapore.

Context: In Germany, fabidoo is offering a similar service.

DemandMade launches YERZIES.com, extending apparel customization beyond screen printing by providing users access to advanced manufacturing methods

News from DemandMade and Scott Killian. Scott, together with his business partner Tim Brule, launched Yerzies.com, an online marketplace that "allows anyone to create, purchase or sell their own customized tee shirts, hoodies and other apparel items."  

Sounds familiar? Yes, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, Cafepress, any many more offer the same. But the differences are in the detail.  

Asked how Yerzies is different, Scott answers: "Although other Websites exist that allow you to design a tee shirt, we've dramatically expanded the variety of creative options and developed new approaches to the way users can profit from their creations."

Read an interview with Scott Killian in the next posting in this blog!

Beyond printed tee shirts, Yerzies enables the creation of stitched sweatshirts and mixed-media designs that include many advanced processes to create apparel which more closely resembles the design trends seen at retail. Yerzies' innovative product configurator allows users to access an unprecedented array of creative options including printing on dark garments, metallic foils, flocks, glitters, glow-in-the-dark materials, and stitched processes.

Buyers are also invited to "Make it Yerz", a feature that allows users to mix and match product options and in some cases, even make modifications to the content created by other users. Yerzies has also reengineered the way user-generated content is marketed.

When users are finished, they can purchase as little as one piece or sell their creations to the Yerzies community and keep the profits. All products are produced on-demand.

Yerzies thus combines advanced new manufacturing techniques with an innovative approach to crowd sourcing. It is another example of the developing trend of user manufacturing and my hypothesis that users are getting more and more advanced manufacturing technology in their hands.

In addition to providing a platform for user-generated content, Yerzies has also licensed content from third-parties including typefaces from designers such as Ray Larabie which users can incorporate into their designs.

Scott: "Helvetica and Times Roman might work nicely for writing a novel, but they don't necessarily look great on a hooded sweatshirt. We've licensed trend-right typefaces that will actually look cool on a tee shirt or hoodie."

The story behind Yerzies: An interview with Scott Killian.

Personal Fabrication for Dummies -- Teaching Videos at Replicator, Inc.

I just discovered the great new blog by Joseph Flaherty, founder of a start-up called Replicator, Inc. While the company will launch in full speed in February 2009, they already were quite successful in securing seed money and attention in a number of important start-up competitions (MIT 100K  (semi-finals), Princeton (semi-finals), and the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition (runner up prize winner)).

I hope that we can meet Joseph at the MIT Smart Customization Seminar in three weeks.

Replicator, Inc., manufactures and sells custom consumer products. Their first product is custom jewelry for tween and teenage girls, sold under the name WhirlyBelle. This is made possible by combining web-based design tools with custom manufacturing

His company blog not just has a recent posting about 47 words you can not use on custom Nike sneakers (which I do not quote here to get my blog not banned from your corporate content filter). In another posting, he has a great chart about the price premiums you can gain with mass customization:

A great number of postings covers user manufacturing and the new opportunities for users to produce anything they want. In one of my favorite posts, Joseph explains all technologies that enable personal fabrication. You probably also could Google those, but Joseph created a great posting with small videos explaining all technologies.

Many people think 3D printers are the way this will happen, but there are half a dozen other amazing technologies that allow people to make anything they can imagine.

While by no means an exhaustive list, his list is a is a very convenient overview for anyone interested in how the idea user co-design meets manufacturing. As Joseph writes:

"Combined with web-based design tools these technologies could enable a change as profound as the industrial revolution: increasing the options for customers while reducing the environmental impact."

His posting shows examples of these machines in action and provides a glimpse of what is possible already today:

1. 3D Printers (some notable examples: Z Corp., Dimension, 3d systems, Objet, Desktop Factory, Paragon Lake, Figure Prints, EOS)

2. Laser Cutters  (Notable Examples: Epilog, Trotec, Etchstar, Ponoko, VersaLaser)

3. Waterjet Cutters (Notable Examples: OMAX, Flow Corp, OCC)

4. 2D Plotter Cutters (Notable Examples: Cricut, CraftRobo, Xyron)

5. Print on Demand (Notable Companies: Blurb, Lulu, Shutterfly)

6. Direct To Garment Printing (Notable Companies: Cafe Press, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, Spoonflower)

7. CNC Milling (Notable Examples: eMachine Shop, Tech Shop, Craftsman Compucarve)

8. CNC Embroidery (Notable Examples: Singer, Brother, Toyota)

9. Cut & Sew Construction (Notable Examples: NIKEiD, Timbuk2, Freitag)

10. 3D Scanning (Notable Examples: Z Corp., Next Engine, 3D Digital Corp., Corpus-e)

Go to his web site to watch all videos

Hard Copies: New Open Designs by Ronen Kadushin

An exhibition at Appel Design Gallery, Berlin 1-22 Nov. 2008 -- and an invitation to download all design and place it on your local CNC machine.

Now we have Ponoko, eMachineshop, JuJups, Shapedays, etc to produce what ever come to our mind in an easy way. But still, at least I don't have every day a nice idea for a great coffee table in my mind.

This is where Ronen Kadushin comes in. I wrote about this Berlin-based designer before. Ronen's idea is to publish all his designs under a CC Creative Commons license( by-nc-sa). So whenever you have access to a CNC cutting facility, you can get his designs:

As Ronen describes: 

"Open Design products flow with an essential cultural wave: towards freer information, Web-based collaborations and open-source methods. In Open Design anyone can download and produce my designs for free. Open Designs encourage modification, redistribution, and direct contact with the designer. I would only ask producers to share with me revenues from commercial uses. This means that with no tooling investment, you can produce Open Design products independently."

All object rely on a very clever 2D digital start point, which makes them easy to alter into new shapes and uses, and they are flat packed. “Hard copies” of the designs can be ordered from any CNC cutting facility that’s local to you, your consumers, or distributors. Ronen's idea is that designs that typically live only a few years in the marketplace can live on and develop.

Still, at the same time, Ronen needs to earn some money. Generating fame and buzz and getting his name out is one of the intentions of the Open Design project. But he also produces some of his collections in high quality and exhibits (and sells) them in an annual exhibition at a Gallery in Berlin.

He says about his new exhibition: 

"This Open Design collection of lighting and furniture limited editions is playing a double role. As gallery pieces, they express my personal style: simple, effortless and humorous. But they also relate to wider cultural issues and offer a designer an alternative course to consumer products, especially relevant in economically troubled times.

There is a feeling about Open Design I would like to convey. Making products this way is, for me, mind clearing and fun. You can feel as good about the Open Design production process, its low environmental footprint, and what it stands for, as you do about the objects themselves."

Context information:
- Freely download the Open Designs and more from www.ronen-kadushin.com
- Order them at Appel Design Gallery, Berlin, www.appel-design.com

Exhibition at:
Appel Design Gallery
Torstr. 114, 10119 Berlin, Germany
phone: +49 (0)30 32 51 81 60
[email protected]

Microcentrum Symposium on Rapid Manufacturing and Mass Customization

Microcentrum Rapid Manufacturing & Mass Customization Symposium
18 November 2008, ’s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands

A new symposium on 18 November in ’s-Hertogenbosch brings Mass Customization and Rapid Manufacturing together. Organized by Microcentrum, a large Dutch research and high-tech education  organization, the seminar brings these two hot topics together.

The text of the pre-announcement describes quite neatly the topic and idea of the event:

Matching mass customization and rapid manufacturing can be compared to writing a letter: Today anyone can write a personalized letter and merge it with data on paper. But why can this be done with letters and not with plastic, metal or ceramic objects? Individuality plays a central role in an increasing number of industrial and consumer products. This topic will be discussed by experts with various backgrounds, including RM guru Terry Wohlers from the United States. I also will have the opportunity to provide a keynote on this event.

The steam engine and the industrial revolution went alongside with each other , and the chip and the second industrial revolution were also closely related. The first industrial revolution was concerned with mechanization, the second one with automation. Mechanization led to many identical objects for many users. The distance between makers and users grew. They became producer and consumer. Automation reinforced this. Mass production exploded in terms of numbers and globalization. The areas in which mechanization and automation took place overlapped each other only slightly and the result was continuous production in large numbers as opposed to a revival of craftsmanship.

Thus the freedom that automation offers does not lead to a greater diversity in products the average individual can obtain. New insights and technological possibilities however, have led to something that lies between the old and new situation: Mass Customization. Products are still made in large quantities. But now the individual does have influence. The Internet plays an important role in enabling the consumer to configure objects to his needs. One of the solutions that has much to offer, despite the fact that it concerns industrial production, is Rapid Manufacturing. The form of objects is no longer dictated by machine tools but rather is directly defined by digital – thus inexpensive – information that can vary for each product and makes each object unique. With this the consumer can also create his own design.

Can sufficient added value be generated with Mass Customization and Rapid Manufacturing for the products to rise above those of the competition? How can both generate profits? This new symposium also targets those responsible for making strategic choices.

The event ‘Rapid Manufacturing & Mass Customization 2008’ will take place on 18 November 2008 in ’s-Hertogenbosch.The conference language is English. Students are entitled to a reduced entry fee.
Organisation: Mikrocentrum. Chairman: Rein van der Mast

Update: Program now online:

09.00  Welcome
 
10.00  Opening of the symposium
Geert Hellings, director Mikrocentrum
 
10.10  Introduction: the shortening distance between RM and MC
Rein van der Mast – chairman
 
10.30  Profiting from Mass Customization: Success Factors and Pitfalls
Frank T. Piller, RWTH Aachen & MIT Smart Customization Group, M.I.T.
 
11.20  The shape of things to come
Jan Willem Gunnink, Delcam PLc
 
11.50  Coffee break
 
12.10  How to get more out of MC, wherever possible with RM
Hans Maessen, Solvagroep
 
12.40  Realizing the business potential of rapid manufacturing
Martijn Laar, Berenschot
 
13.10  Lunch break
 
14.00  The Future of Rapid and Custom Manufacturing
Terry Wohlers, Wohlers Associates, Inc
 
14.50  Rapid Manufacturing cost-effective?
Mike Ayre, Crucible
 
15.40  Metal Rapid Manufacturing
Jonas van Vaerenbergh, Layerwise
 
16.10  Coffee break
 
16.30  RapidManufacturing.net
Liam van Koert, Array Publications
 
16.40  Tailored solutions for sourcing Rapid Manufacturing components
Jurgen Laudus, Materialise
 
17.20  Conclusions
Rein van der Mast - chairman
 
17.30  Drinks and networking
 
For more information, check back to the event web site.

The next generation of user design: Forget about CAD, just handdraw your design, and Ponoko will make it

While this may be small step for mankind, it is a large step for user co-design and customization. Until today, users who wanted to get a custom product had to be able to use at least an online configurator, or, in case they wanted larger freedom of creation as offered by user manufacturing sites like Ponoko, eMachineshop, Shapeways, Fabidoo, or others, they had to be able to use some graphik design software.

Now Ponoko makes co-designing even more intuitive and easier. The crew today launched their service Photomake. It turns digital photos of hand drawings into real products simply by uploading them to the Ponoko website.

The company is again one step further to its mission of making "it super simple for anyone to make anything that is on their mind, at low cost."

Previously at Techcrunch40, Ponoko launched Designmake for designers to make things on demand – over 10,000 have signed up. Earlier this year, they also launched Ponoko ID for shoppers to request goods to be made just for them by these designers. Now with Photomake they're inviting creative people who don't know how to use design software to participate simply by sketching what they want on a piece of paper and uploading a photo of it to get it made.

Derek Elley from Ponoko said in an e-mail that "One of the cool things about Photomake is the quality of the result – it's truly hand drawn. Because digital making is so very precise every tiny bump in the hand drawn creation is picked up and made for real. This gives a very natural and human feel to the things you make."

The trick behind Photomake is some very clever file conversion technology that is more accurate than anything that has come before it. It is designed so that what you draw is what is made, without any touching up required in a design software program.

This is a major revolution in the democratization of design and innovation. We know from empirical research that many users innovate and have creative ideas ahead of the market. Up to today, they either needed a manufacturer listening to them and turning their ideas into products. Or they had to have specific skills to turn their ideas by themselves into a design and get it produced. The later process was made much easier in the last few years, but still required skills in using design software and how to place a design on a machine. Now, even this hurdle blurs ... driven by new technology that allows this process at rather low cost.

So, go ahead and just hand draw your next Christmas presents.

Context:
- Press release by Ponoko on their new service.
- Video showing the entire process: http://www.ponoko.com/photomake
- On the upcoming MIT Smart Customization seminar, Cathy Lewis, CEO of Desktop Factory, will present what will be next: Transfer your custom designs into products in your home as easy as today printing a document.

Fancy Feet Custom Shoes: Update on Keds/Zazzle Custom Footwear

Last month, I reported about the cooperation of Keds and Zazzle that brought custom sneakers to a new level. Now, there is a first user-generated mashup-up of this offering. Check the website of Fancy Feet.

Here, a user programmed a few very easy, but nice, templates to customize sneakers with names and monograms. To fulfill his orders, the site entirely relies on Zazzle and its cooperation with Keds to manufacture the shoes.

This is a great example of the next generation of mass customization: A user utilizes a design and manufacturing infrastructure to create a new business.

By the way: Keds and Zazzle will share their experiences on the upcoming MIT Smart Customization Seminar in November at the MIT Faculty Club in Cambridge, MA. Click here for more information.

Genometri is spinning-off new user manufacturing start-up, JuJups

Customization veteran Sivam Krish (CEO of Genometri.com) is in the progress of launching a new company, JuJups. The idea of JuJups is to create a kind of Über-Personalization site combining ideas we have seen at Ponoko, Shapeways, Fabidoo ... etc.

JuJups.com shall become a new generation 3-D design creation gateway that allows consumers to create their own 3D content. Through JuJups, a worldwide community of users will come together to co-create, share, and co-produce designs - designs that can be realized as real-world products.

3D printing and Rapid Manufacturing methods are now maturing into affordable and reliable technologies which are increasingly accessible to companies. Combined with online design tools, this is opening up a whole new dimension of product possibilities where products can be designed, personalized and customized by customers themselves. Given the great capabilities Genometri has with regard to 3D design tools, this is a venture to watch!

In a new blog, he is reporting about his venture. http://genometri.com/blog/ In today's posting, he provides a nice quote by Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos (old, but not known to me before):

"Before long, “user-generated content” won’t refer only to media, but to just about anything: user-generated jeans, user-generated sports cars, user-generated breakfast meals. This is because setting up a company that designs, makes and globally sells physical products could become almost as easy as starting a blog - and the repercussions would be earthshaking."

In his blog post, Sivam summarizes neatly that this already is happening. His company, Genometri, is working on some of the technologies that will take this much further. The prosumer economy is taking shape as the result of convergence of three major developments: 1. Online Content Creation, 2. Mass Customization, 3. Social Networking.

Read his full blog post for a good summary of recent companies in the field.

Shapeways Launches Consumer-Focused Customizable 3D Merchandise Platform

Shapeways is spinning-out from the Lifestyle Incubator of Royal Philips Electronics, located in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The site can be seen in the lines of Ponoko, Zapfab and other user manufacturing sites allowing users to create and manufacture their own design with a large freedom of design.

The site very neatly incorporates all elements of a good user manufacturing system I outlined some time ago in this blog:

- A 3D model library
- An easy-to-operate 3D-design toolkit (well, not at this stage yet)
- A flexile manufacturing system producing the users' design (more or less) rapidely

Utilizing a 3D model library, (starting with a lamp and a bowl), consumers can manipulate the structure, look and feel of their own products. Users can twist, mash, and create their own 3D objects which then are being produced within 10-days or less. Shapeways then verifies objects to ensure printability and provides a real-time cost estimate. Within 10 working days, a tangible 3D product will be produced and arrive at the consumer's home globally.

Browsing over the site, it still looks a bit beta, and their co-design toolkits is an external Java-based software that demands quite some time to download and install separately. Using it then however was easy (despite some annoying comments that I should create a profile). But it is a start ...

Anyway, Shapeways takes a major step towards the next generation of consumer co-creation and mass customization. Consumers without 3D modeling skills can shape, mash, imprint and design their own 3D products at Shapeways.com. Products are produced with a rapid manufacturing system, and in the moment they all still have this white prototyping look :-)

From lamps with a personal message to fruit bowls linking back to memorable moments, the Shapeways Creator Engine has a beta library of predesigned product templates which the company will grow rapidly over 2009.

"We recognize the desire of consumers who want to own or give something that is unique and has their special, personal touch," Peter Weijmarshausen, CEO of Shapeways, is quoted in a press release.

"With the Creator Engine, now anyone can participate in the artistic process and create something that is truly a reflection of their own needs and tastes. With the Creator Engine, we have broken the currently existingtrade-off between freedom of design and the complexity of the design process."

Shapeways can be seen as a new application of rapid manufacturing in the consumer space. I recently attended the Rapid Manufacturing Conference at Loughborough University. While a posting on this event is overdue since weeks (especially after Jochen Krisch invited one publicly), I refer you to Matt Sinclairs's great report about this conference which also provides you much more insights in the kind of products we can expect in the future on platforms of Shapeways.

Context:

- My earlier posts on Fabbing and Rapid Manufacturing.

- Matt Sinclair's report on the 3rd RM Conference

Conference invitation: 3rd International Conference on Rapid Manufacturing (RM) to be held at Loughborough University on July 9 and 10

Rapid Manufacturing, also know as direct, digital, generative manufacture or additive fabrication, is one of the most exciting emergent technologies available to mass customize today. RM uses 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD) data to directly 'print' or 'grow' parts in a variety of polymeric, metallic, ceramic and organic materials. When fully implemented, it allows almost unlimited variety at no extra variable cost. Old paradigms of optimizing between switching and inventory cost will go away. While the potential of these technologies have been discussed since years, only very recently a larger scale of commercial application has begun.

The most exciting application of rapid manufacturing, in my perspective, is its enabling role for user manufacturing (previous postings on the topic). A new generation of rather cheap machines is coming to the market now promise to replicate the development we had in the printing industry: Form large printing presses to large laser printing systems to the desktop printer. The same may happen to manufacturing. From large centralized factories to decentralized plants to a factory on your desk.

The International Conference on Rapid Manufacturing (RM) is the world's only conferences focused on this trend. Organized by some core members of our mass customization community, the Rapid Manufacturing Group at Loughborough University in the UK, the conference focuses solely on the application of 'end use parts', made using additive layer manufacturing technologies.

The past events have been attended by over 150 delegates and speakers from around the world. The event provides a two day showcase of invited speakers, including the very best in both academic RM research activity and commercial RM applications. The event also plays host to a parallel technology and materials exhibition supported by leading RM systems vendors exclusively for conference delegates.

The program is divided in an academic and a business stream. Topics presented in the business track include:

- Developing a business case for customized RM
- RM for the home based market
- Ultrasonic Consolidation
- Developing intellectual property in RM product
- Pushing the boundaries of RM consumer products
- The socio-economic benefits of RM
- DMLS for high performance RM applications
- Quality management in RM using non destructive testing

The conference further will cover process and materials issues, design opportunities, management and organizational issues and industrial applications, making the conference of relevance to engineers, designers and business managers, as well as academics and researchers and RM materials and system developers.

For more information, registration, and the full program, please go to http://www.rm-conference.com/index.htm

New Blog on Mass Customization and Rapid Ranufacturing and how this will influence the design profession

We dont do retro is the personal blog of Matt Sinclair, a designer based in Helsinki. I first met Matt on the MCPC 2007 conference and then again last week on a workshop in Helsinki, and he does REALLY interesting work on user co-design.

His blog mainly concerned with mass customization and rapid manufacturing, which are the areas he researching for his PhD at Loughborough University in the UK. But you’ll also find information about other subjects that interest him - lead user innovation, open source design and industrial design in general (Matt also wrote one of the most extensive MCPC 2007 reviews)!

His Ph.D. is titled "An investigation of the feasibility of product architectures to facilitate consumer-created designs in the consumer electronics industry, using rapid manufacturing technologies as an enabler"

While he expects not to be ready before Summer 2010, his early thoughts already are quite interesting:

"Rapid Manufacturing (RM) is defined as the direct production of finished parts or products, most often utilising one of a number of 3D printing technologies. ... The most important difference between rapid manufacturing technologies and traditional mass manufacturing technologies such as injection moulding is the absence of tooling. This has a number of important implications. One of the common features of mass manufacturing processes is that the means of production require substantial initial investment, however once in place the cost of manufacturing a single part or product (relative to the initial investment) is negligible. It is therefore a basic principle of mass manufacturing that as the number of parts produced increases, the cost of production of each individual part decreases. This inevitably leads to uniformity, since even small design changes require significant reinvestment in tooling.
...

Mass customisation offers the possibility of designing for niche markets, in small production runs, but it will be impossible for a designer, or even a design team, to be an expert in all these niches. Designers will therefore need to accept the necessity of inviting consumers to take part in the design process, even to design their own products. Furthermore, rapid manufacturing reduces the level of technological expertise required to design functioning parts. It is therefore likely that consumers will begin to design and produce their own products whether officially sanctioned by a brand or not.

The purpose of the traditional design process is not just to impose a uniform aesthetic however, it also refines and rejects on the basis of ergonomics, durability, integration with other products and systems, cost etc. These are all areas in which the designer’s expertise is the best tool to resolve the conflicting demands of a product brief. To make sense of the potential for multiple product variants which mass customisation offers, my hypothesis is therefore that the task of the industrial designer will in future be to create modular product architectures which define and limit the parameters of any possible design."

Go to Matt's blog here: We dont do retro

Zapfab: User-generated content meets 3D Printing

A new Ponoko-alike company is coming from Manchester in the UK! Zapfab Ltd is a user manufacturing start up that offers a new way of delivering individualized, customized products. As other companies in this field, they are combining the creativity of user-generated content with the power of 3D Printing (fabbing).

In a press release I got today, the company is described as follows:

"User-generated content is ubiquitous throughout the internet, from weblogs to YouTube videos. Zapfab builds on this trend, by providing a website where users can easily generate unique designs for 3D objects.

3D Printing is rapidly gaining ground as a way of creating real, physical objects from 3D design data. Zapfab provides an easy way to access this technology: Once you have generated a 3D design you can choose to have it 3D printed: Zapfab will 3D print the design and deliver the finished object to you.

The Zapfab website has two main areas: the Design Catalog and the 3D Customizer. The Design Catalog contains all the designs on the site and is a repository like Google's 3D warehouse. The 3D Customizer is where the customizing takes place: Each design can be customized in different ways: color, size, pattern, etc. and the 3D Customizer contains simple controls for each of the options. So, once a user has customized a design, she can save it back into the catalog for other people to see. And then they in turn can customize and build on her design.

“We see three main groups of users for Zapfab.com,” said Julie Wood, Zapfab Director, in the press release “First, we have made the 3D Customizer really easy to use, so that anyone can create a unique, customized design in just a few minutes.

Second, there are a range of users with 3D modelling skills, who will be able to upload their designs to the site; and we aim to make it easy for them to add customizations to those designs.

Third, users with programming or scripting skill will be able to create new, highly-customizable designs. And all the designs, from the simplest to the most complex, are customizable through the same easy-to-use 3D Customizer.”

At the moment, Zapfab’s Design Catalog contains over 100 customized designs, ranging from bowls to boxes and bangles. All of the designs can be 3D printed “as is”, or freely customized. It is a nice, but at this stage not too creative collection of things. But I hope to see much more activity on their side, and given that they are located in Europe, I also will try this service by myself in the next weeks and let you know about my experiences.

Great Report on User Manufacturing, Mass Customization, and How a New Infrastructure is Providing New Opportunities for SMEs

Last week, I got a note by Steve King, a research affiliate with the Institute for the Future. This is a non-profit research group based in Silicon Valley. Founded in 1968 by a group of former RAND Corporation researchers with a grant from the Ford Foundation to take leading-edge research methodologies into the public and business sectors, the IFTF today publishes reports to help people and companies to understand what is coming next.

They recently released a forecast report that is part of a series on the future of small business. In this report, they stress that small businesses will actively take advantage and use new manufacturing methods to create mass customized goods.

The report was sponsored by Intuit and can be downloaded on their website: http://www.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness/ (download Report #3)

In the report, IFTF writes about a new artisan economy that is the result of new manufacturing technologies, enabling individuals to access similar production technologies as large corporations (crafters using Ponoko, see previous posting, are a perfect example). It is a very nice summary of many of the recent trends that I have discussed here. Fabbing, blogging, user manufacturing, customization, open innovation -- it's all there and brought into a nice and coherent framework.

I especially liked the part about the new infrastructure that is enabling these developments:

"Plug-and-play infrastructures will make small businesses more competitive and successful. The ability of small businesses to take advantage of large-scale infrastructures and leverage new technologies will allow them to enter and compete in industries formerly served only by big business."

As an example, they refer to a great service that is enabling moms to become entrepreneurs, Mom Inventors, Inc.:

"For those who want to avoid teh hassle of assembling these services, firms are available to do everything for an entrepreneur. Mom Inventors Ic., for example, weill develop, manufacture, and sell quality Mom invented products throughout the United States and Europe. The mom (entrepreneur) only needs to come up with the idea, Mom Inventors will do the rest."

So I am expecting to these many more knitted marvels and clever kitchen aids on the shelves, invented by "Lead Moms".

In an e-mail exchange, Steve told me more about the background of the report, and stressed another implication from their research:

"A major issue we are trying to figure out is how small business relates to mass customization and user innovation. This was originally prompted by our work looking at consumer generated media - specifically blogs.

We found that the blogs with the most traffic were not authored by consumers, but by professionals. The professionals tended to fall into two categories: (1) small or independent businesses trying to build a small publishing business; or (2) professionals using blogs to promote either themselves or the goods and services of their company. Looking deeper at the second group, we found that most of them worked for small businesses.

Based on this work (which we did several years ago), we started looking at other categories. We quickly found a similar pattern of small business participation across a broad range of categories, including media (YouTube videos, etc.), open source software, crafts and small scale manufacturing (a lot of Makers at Maker Faire are small businesses, for example), financial services, etc.

Basically, we saw small businesses playing a role in almost every category where niche products and/or services were being built or highly customized. We also found a pattern of category "power users" moving from being hobbyists to starting their own small businesses. We kept seeing "prosumers" turning into small businesses, and we kept seeing small businesses somewhere in the customization value chain."

Accordingly, another area indicated in the report where small businesses will grow in the future is to serve as an innovation lab for larger corporations. Platforms like Innocentive or P&G's connect and develop program will help small businesses to sell their creativity to larger corporations in an efficient way. This may be the next wave of contract research.

Overall, a nice summary of recent trends that is worthwhile reading due its focus on small businesses.

Context: Get the full report here. http://www.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness/ (download Report #3)

Ponoko: Design Contest and Latest Press on User Manufacturing Enabler Ponoko

Ponoko (see earlier report) gave one of the favorite presentations at the MCPC 2007 in Boston. The company is a perfect example of user manufacturing. Nic from Ponoko just informed me about their 10-day design challenge series, running from today until March 10. Each day, they ask for designs within a special category.

Being a small company, prices are not that big, but it will be lots of fun and it seems to be an easy way to test Ponoko. The Ponoko crew also can fill its assortment of user design with this project -- and thus, even if you do not win, chances are that other people like your design and you can sell it though their on-demand manufacturing system. The winner gets $1,000. 10 get $300. 25 get their designs made for free ...

For more details on the contest, go here.

Ponoko also got plenty of press in the last weeks, here is a review:

The New York Times – Tinkering at Home, Selling on the Web

The Economist – Bespoke Manufacturing – I made it my way

BBC News – The shape of things to come

Wired – (multiple articles)

MIT Technology Review – Automated Custom Manufacturing

TechCrunch – (multiple articles)

Engadget – Ponoko now live to make, market your gizmo

TrendWatching – 8 important consumer trends for 2008

Treehugger – (multiple articles)

Industry Study on State of Rapid Manufacturing and the Future of Production

EOS, a leading manufacturer of laser-sintering systems, recently presented a market study on the state of laser-sintering technology for production tasks (called rapid manufacturing, e-Manufacturing or also fabbing). These technologies have been used pre-dominantly for prototyping tasks in the past where they allowed experimentation to a much higher degree. But their real economic impact comes from their role as a manufacturing technology, allowing custom manufacturing with no switching cost. It is now starting to compete with conventional casting technologies.

Rapid manufacturing delivers end products, functional parts and tools directly from CAD data. A laser heats and melts powdered plastics or metals layer by layer, until the build is complete and a final product can be taken out of the system. Whether it is jewelery, clothes, lamps, chairs or functional parts for components that are being manufactured, laser sintering and similar generative manufacturing technologies enable the creation of products with highly complex and filigreed structures and forms that are unthinkable geometries for conventional series production – and each piece can be customized at no additional cost.

EOS is, according to its own statement, the world-leading provider of this technology with revenues in laser-sintering of 59.7 million Euro in 2007, an increase of 14 percent compared to the previous year. This number shows that the market still is very small compared to the multi-billion market of traditional production equipment.

On the recent EuroMold Trade Show, the company conducted a survey among industry experts about the future of manufacturing. Is individualized series production from CAD data going to prevail in the future? And which technologies will drive this type of production? The answers on this survey have been published in a recent press release.

While no information is given on the number of respondents or any basic statistical validity, and the study obviously is biased due to its originator, here some quotes from the press release which address some questions I often get from readers of this blog:

33% of the respondents believe that individualized production with laser-sintering is already market-ready, while 37% predict the establishment of the technology in the market within the next three years. The rest anticipate the establishment of rapid manufacturing within five years, with only 4% seeing a lag of ten years.

According to the survey, rapid manufacturing is driven by the general mass customization trend. Both industry and end consumers increasingly request individually manufactured products, creating a potential demand for mass customization of those products. And this is exactly where rapid manufacturing comes into play: 28% of those interviewed said that the trend towards individualized series production is the most important factor for the success of the technology.

Nearly a quarter of the interviewees saw greater “cost savings compared to conventional technologies”.
22% judged that rapid manufacturing will overtake traditional technologies due to “shorter product life cycles”.

But rapid manufacturing with laser-sintering also faces a number of challenges: 29% of the interviewees called the limited choice of materials as the greatest barrier to implementation of rapid manufacturing technology.

Interestingly, respondents felt that the main difficulty is not so much the emerging technology itself, but rather a lack of knowledge and openness in the industry. Approximately a quarter of the respondents judged the “lack of know-how in the industry” as a hindrance. Companies are yet not aware about the technology or lack the capability to change their design and production processes in such a radical way.

Finally the interviewees were asked for their predictions about production methods 20 years in the future.
A clear majority (63%) forecast the broad establishment of mass customization in the Western world. 21% even believe that end customers will have their own mini-factories and produce their own products with rapid manufacturing. About 9% of those asked went so far as to remark that, in 20 years time, manual manufacturing will only take place on the PC.

Context:

- My previous posts on rapid manufacturing
- EOS site with case studies and more articles
- 3rd International Rapid Manufacturing Conference 2008 in the UK - I will speak there as well!

User Manufacturing Trendwatching Report

Trendwatching, a large trend research network, has recently published its annual briefing on the main trends for 2008. Among them is my favorite new topic, user manufacturing (other terms for the same idea are desktop manufacturing, manufacturing as a service, fabbing, ...). Named "MIY – Make it Myself" the Trendwatching crew is naming user manufacturing as the next big thing in user-created content.

"[user generated content]" is a mainstream trend now, one that keeps giving, with millions of consumers uploading their creative endeavors online, and tens of millions of others enjoying the fruits of their creativity. User-generated content, at least in the online world, has grown from a teenage hobby to an almost equal contender to established entities in news, media, entertainment and craft."

These consumers expect to be able to create anything they want as long as it is digital, and to customize and personalize many physical goods with traditional mass customization offerings. The next step in this evolution will be their desire to transfer digitally designed products into real physical goods as well.

Trendwatching is expecting that "MIY | MAKE IT YOURSELF (and then SIY | SELL IT YOURSELF) becomes increasingly sophisticated in the next 12 months".

As references, they refer to old friends which have been covered in this blog before:

# New Zealand-based Ponoko (which works like a Zazzle for 3D objects, see my original article on them here)

# Fab Lab Bcn (Barcelona) is part of the worldwide network of Fab Labs, an initiative of MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, and provides a laser-cutter, water jet, 3D printer, mini-mill and other machines for participants to use. One of Fab Lab's initiators is Neil Gershenfeld, professor at MIT and author of FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop.

# The Desktop Factory 3D printer, with a list price of USD 4,995, uses an inexpensive halogen light source and drum printing technology to build robust parts from composite plastic powder, layer by layer. Desktop Factory envisages that within three years, Desktop Factory's 3D printers will be affordable for home use.

# They also mention the Swedish design group FRONT and their Sketch Furniture project. This trio materializes freehand sketches of furniture into real options. Very nice, very expensive with a chair starting at USD 10,500 per piece.

The last section of their trend report is very important to read, something that I always mention in my presentations on the limitations of user manufacturing:

"Now, we're not saying every consumer is going to design and manufacture his or her own furniture or appliances. Rather, MIY is yet another piece of the participation puzzle: enabling those consumers who feel like it to call the shots, bypassing traditional players. In future briefings we’ll address the implications of what this choice – being able to consume ready-made or create their own versions of anything and everything – will mean for the behavior and expectations of younger generations."

Context:
- The orginal Trendwatching report

- My original report about user manufacturing and my definition of this idea

- My earlier report about Ponoko (more here).

- My earlier report about the low cost 3D printers

- If you can read German, Jochen Krisch had many excellent postings on user manufacturing in the last months, a very good staring point is his recent listing of all 3D printing services on the web.

- A very good starting point also is press reports of Z-Printer, a manufacturer of 3D printers used to make custom objects.

MIT Technology Review on Ponoko: "Ponoko wants to give customers the tools to design and sell whatever they want."

Last week, Michael Gibson published a very nice analysis on Ponoko in the MIT Technology Review. I wrote about this company before, and the article has a nice summary of the recent developments of this user manufacturing start up.

Gibson writes:

"For most companies, product design and development is a long process of trial and error, involving, among other things, in-house designers, committees, timed product releases, and, ultimately, customer feedback. Until a product sells, or if it doesn't sell, it takes up costly shelf space in either stores or warehouses.

But by letting individuals dream up, make, and then sell unique products on demand, Ponoko is attempting to eliminate the product-development wing. Ultimately, it hopes to eliminate the need for a centralized manufacturing plant as well, by recruiting a large enough community of digital manufacturers--people scattered around the world who have 3-D printers, CNC routers, and laser cutters. Moving the site of production as close as possible to the point of purchase will reduce the need for long-distance shipping.

"Just as personal computing went from the mainframe to the desktop, and the result was distributed desktop computing, we see the same trend occurring with digital manufacturing, as it moves from the warehouse to the desktop," says Derek Elley, the chief strategy officer for Ponoko."

At the end of the article, Gibson quotes Phillip Torrone, a senior editor at Make magazine, who tried Ponoko to create a custom stand for his iPhone:

"They did everything that was required for me to get my product," Torrone says. "Their tutorials are fine; the templates were good examples. Pretty much, they did everything right. Now the question is, is there a demand? How much money does a company like this need to make to stay afloat?"

Ellery's answer is that, eventually, Ponoko's revenue will come entirely from digital services, not from manufacturing fees. The company intends to develop six revenue streams, including ad sales and commissions on design purchases."

For more analysis, head to the full article.

Ponoko and related services, and the corresponding business model, are the theme of my upcoming webinar with Pure Inisghts. More information here!

Webinar: The Next Gen of Mass Customization: User Manufacturing, Instant Companies, and Customer Co-Creation (Nov 29, 2007 on your desktop)

How a new infrastructure is enabling consumers to become instant manufacturers – and your future competitor -- 10% discount for MC&OI Blog readers

I am coming back to your desktop. After the large success of an earlier webinar on mass customization, London based Pure Inisghts is organizing a second webinar on the theme, this time around my new favorite topic of user manufacturing.

The topic: We are used to have a networked laser printer on every desk in our office and in every home, enabling us to print documents on the spot which a few decades ago demanded a specialized manufacturer. The same may be happening with the production of many other goods. Today new production technologies ("fabbing") and advanced design software allow average users to produce almost everything – on their own desk. Welcome to the factory in your kitchen.

This session will discuss the upcoming user manufacturing trend, a development that recently is taking shape in larger scope and scale: User manufacturing refers to a public available software, manufacturing, and distribution infrastructure that enables creative users and customers to design, build, and sell own creations to a larger public – without the traditional investments in setting up a business. User manufacturing supplements – or substitutes – mass customization strategies which many companies have implemented. It also may become the most efficient strategy to serve the long tail of variants in many industries.

Consider Spreadshirt, one of the world's largest producers of graphic t-shirts. This company just allows everyone to create an own assortment of designs, and then sell this assortments in highly targeted retail outlets, online and offline, to a small market segment the user knows best. Thus, Spreadshirt does not have to predict the long tail of heterogeneity of fashion products, but just focuses on allowing users to create and sell this assortment by their own.

User manufacturing is enabled by three main technologies: (1) Easy-to-operate design software that allows users to transfer their ideas into a design. (2) Design repositories where users upload, search, and share designs with other users. This allows a community of loosely connected users to develop a large range of applications. (3) Easy-to-access flexible manufacturing technology. New rapid manufacturing technologies ("fabbing") finally deliver the dream of translating any 3-D data files into physical products -- even in you living room. Combining this technology with recent web technologies can open a radical new way to provide custom products along the entire "long tail" of demand.

User manufacturing builds on the notion that users are not just able to configure a good within the given solution space (mass customization), but also to develop such a solution space by their own and utilize it by producing custom products. As a result, customers are becoming not only co-designers, but also manufacturers, using an infrastructure provided by some specialized companies.

The webinar will discuss recent trends and case examples of the user manufacturing trend. We also will compare the business models of companies which are building on the user manufacturing trend and which implement and operate the underlying infrastructure ´for creative users to become manufacturers.

Planned session outline:

- A short review of conventional mass customization thinking

- Which recent trends and developments enhance these strategies and how mass customization is related to “The Long Tail” phenomena

- What is user manufacturing, and which trends does this strategy support?

- What are the components of an infrastructure that supports user manufacturing?

- A review of business models of established companies and recent startups which already successfully benefit from the opportunities of user manufacturing

- A discussion of the major challenges and open issues in this domain

- Session wrap-up: Idea for further action

To register, please go to http://www.pure-insight.com/webinars/mass-customization-next-generation and use promotional code aix (case sensitive!) wenn registering for a 10% discount.

Note: You also can download the webinar after its initial live broadcast – but only when joining live, you can interact and ask direct questions.

All further information can be found here.

Context information

- If you prefer to see the content of this webinar in action, a seminar on Fabbing and User generated Manufacturing in Essen, Germany, provides a great opportunity on Nov 22.

- My earlier posts on user manufacturing

- Article in CNN online on the fabbing trend

- Article in New Scientist on the fabbing trend

- Article in Make magazine on how to use a fabbing device

Rethinking Business: Products of tomorrow: Fabbing, personalization & custom manufacturing (Essen, 22. Nov 2007)

A VERY interesting focused event on the new world of fabbing, laser sintering, user manufacturing, and how to make business with this will take place in Essen (Germany) on Nov 22 afternoon & evening. Hosted by Z-Punkt, an innovative trend consultancy, and taking place in the Zeche Zollverein, a spectacular industrial location, the conference promised to become a real eye-opener and point of discussion.

For more information on the theme, have a look on this previous blog post: I will host a webinar on the same topic of user manufacturing on Nov 29 in case you cannot travel to Essen, Germany, for this event.

For a list of all speakers and the detailed program, please download the event flyer.

The event will be in German language, so all the following announcements are in German language as well.

Erfahren Sie, wie neue Materialien zu Innovationstreibern werden und warum der 3D-Druck das Business revolutioniert. Die Konferenz "Rethinking Business #02. Produkte von morgen" findet am 22. November 2007 auf der Zeche Zollverein in Essen statt. Themenschwerpunkte: Neue Materialien und individuelle Produktion.

Und noch mehr Informationen zum Thema finden Sie in einen Interview mit Frank Piller auf dem Z-Punkt-Blog.

Drucken wir in ein paar Jahren unser Geschirr jeden Tag frisch aus unserem persönlichen 3D-Drucker aus? Und werden die Fallschirme der Zukunft aus Nano-Spinnfäden gefertigt? Wie neue Materialien die Produktwelt von morgen prägen und welches Innovationspotenzial in einer individualisierten Produktionsweise steckt – das diskutiert Z_punkt im Rahmen der Konferenz „Produkte von morgen“ am 22. November 2007 in der Zollverein School of Management and Design in Essen.

Die zweite Veranstaltung im Rahmen des Konferenzzyklus „Rethinking Business“ setzt den Fokus auf „Neue Materialien und Individuelle Produktion“ – und schlägt dabei die Brücke von der Vision zur Praxis. Der nach dem Open-Source-Modell „fab@home“ für 2.000,- Euro gebaute Prototyp eines einfachen 3D-Druckers geht während der Konferenz live in Produktion und vermittelt den Teilnehmern einen Eindruck von den zukünftigen Möglichkeiten einer Fabrik im Taschenformat: Mit einem für Endkunden erschwinglichen 3D-Printer könnte das Ausdrucken von Alltagsprodukten nämlich bald flächendeckend zu Hause möglich sein.

„Uns beschäftigt im Rahmen der Rethinking-Business-Reihe die Frage, wie die Wirtschaft der Zukunft funktioniert. Dieses Mal interessieren wir uns für die Produktwelt. Wir fragen: Wie sehen die Produkte der Zukunft aus? Wie werden sie entwickelt und hergestellt? Und wie müssen sich Unternehmen aufstellen, um intelligente Materialien und individuelle Produktion als Innovationstreiber zu nutzen“, sagt Andreas Neef, geschäftsführender Gesellschafter von Z_punkt.

Darauf muss die Wirtschaft vorbereitet sein – wie einst beim Siegeszug des Personal Computers. Dr. Matthias Lüken, Produktentwickler bei Henkel, und Dr. Sigurd Buchholz, Technologieexperte bei der Bayer Technology Services GmbH, berichten aus der Industrieperspektive über Anwendungsmöglichkeiten und Innovationspotenziale einer individualisierten Produktionsweise.

Weitere Infos:
Rethinking Business #02. Produkte von morgen

22 Nov 2007, 16:00 - 21:30 Uhr at Zollverein School of Management & Design, Essen

http://www.rethinkingbusiness.de

Programm-Flyer und Anmeldung online (Studenten können für nur 50 Euro teilnehmen !)

Info: Silke Schneider ([email protected])

MCPC 2007: Finally a Conference Report & Review

The MCPC 2007 now is over since almost a month, and finally I get the time to restart blogging. Immediately after the conference, my teaching period at RWTH started, and I was very busy in keeping my students happy.

What to write? The MCPC 2007 was a terrific and very rewarding event. We were a great bunch of several hundreds of people at MIT and HEC Montreal, and the depth and quality of discussion was amazing. To get an overview, you can download all abstracts of the conference here. You also can order the full-text proceedings here.

I will not provide a long conference report here but let our participants talk. We received this quotes after the conference, and they summarize very neatly what was special about this conference:

"Thank you for organizing the best conference I have ever attended. This conference gave me a lot of power, ideas, and inspiration for my future research. I have been struggling in my research regarding MC for footwear for ten years. Few researchers are studying MC for the footwear industry in the US, but learning that many researchers and firms are tackling this issue in other countries, gave me inspiration. In addition, many colleagues don't realize the enormous potential of MC. Now I can perceive of a clear future direction for MC after attending this conference." Sage Endo, School of Business Administration, University of Mississippi

"Excellent conference. I thought Joe Pine's talk was enough to make the
conference worthwhile (it was) but then the rest of it was beyond my
expectations as well. Congratulations." Suzanne Loker; Cornell University

"One of the best, if not the best conference I've ever been to. Right mix of
theory and practice." Oinonen Sami, Nokia

"It has been one of the most rewarding conferences I've have attended. It was really
well organized as it brought together a heterogeneous group of people
who usually don't interfere with each other. The complementary competencies make an ideal arena for some really exiting stuff to happen." Christian Thuesen, NCC Construction Denmark

"It was an eye opener and I can't remember a time when so much new information (at least for me) was crammed into such a short time." Art St Onge, President, St Onge Company

"Seeing so many people trying to forward mass customization across so many different disciplines was very inspiring and I'm already looking forward to the next conference!" Monika Desai, Footwear Entrepreneur, Boston

And one note made all of us very proud:

"Thank you so much for getting me to speak at this week's event! I thoroughly enjoyed it, and seeing what a great group of folks you have brought together to push forward the state of art in Mass Customization." B. Joseph Pine II, Author of "Mass Customization"

Joe gave a really inspiring talk to start the conference. It almost was a journey though his life, starting with the very first research on mass customization and ending with its most recent book (just published this month) on Authenticity.

Joe agreed that we can share his slides and so you can follow his thoughts at least partly on paper. Download his presentation here. (Including Joe's personal comments on screen during the presentation!).

For more conference reviews, several blogs have provided feedback:

A great large and extensive conference report can be found here: http://no-retro.com/home/category/mass-customisation/

Ronal Reddington from the Made For One Blog collected a selection of feedback from our visitors posted in several blogs. He could not make it in person to the MCPC; but contributed with this selection! Thanks a lot, Ronal!

Based on his original summary, here are some quotes and links to more extensive reports:

First off, Peter Semmelhack of Bug Labs, who spoke at MCPC 2007, wrote briefly about the event on the company’s BugBloggers weblog. For some pictures, just look here.

As Ronal Reddington wrote, Bug Labs is producing an open source, modular consumer electronics platform which will allow individual users to customize gadgets. I am really looking forward to their launch at the end of this year.

Elaine Polvinen, Professor of Fashion Textile Technology at Buffalo State University, published her thoughts on the MCPC Business Seminar in Montreal on her Virtual Fashion Technology blog. Her conclusion:

"The conference was short, and jam packed with interesting presentations highlighting the latest developments in mass customization and personalization. Someone mentioned at the conference that an obstacle preventing wider scale use of mass customization and personalization was a system to input and save standardized measurements. As I listened to these comments I remembered that such a system was recently developed in Korea called i-fashion."

I-Fashion was represented with several talks during the MCPC research conference at MIT.

Michael Galpert, Chief Operations Officer of Worth100.com, shares his notes on MPCP 2007 Pre-Conference Workshop at MIT. Real notes, but interesting to read (especially for me to see what people note while I am talking :-).

Adrian Bowyer of the RepRap digital manufacturing machine (3D printer) project, posted about his journey to Boston and how he set up one of the ‘Darwin’ 3D printers in the conference lobby. This was one of the great exhibits we had a MIT !! And one of the most interesting discussions we had a MIT: The upcoming world of user manufacturing where cheap manufacturing infrastructure will allow users to make directly what they want ... without having to wait for a manufacturer to set up a traditional mass customization system for them.

Another home fabbing device we had on the conference was the famous Fab@Home machine from Cornell university (I wrote about this before in this blog).

Robert Freund reports in German, but larger detail on his impressions from the conference and the feedback he received.

Ruben Robert of open innovation accellerator FellowForce has published a short summary of his MCPC presentation ‘The Business Smarts of Strangers’ on the FellowForce blog. And FellowForce also gave us their innovation widget for free to gather feedback and ideas for the next MCPC 2009 ! (See it on the conference web site),

The writers of the OPENeur blog also participated át the MCPC 2007 – here is their preview.

Adam Fletcher from Spreadshirt also reported from its MCPC 2007 trip which took place while he was very busy in running the "Open Logo project" for Spreadshirt: Posting 1 and Posting 2

So: A great event with great people and really interesting discussions. The next conference will be in Europe in September/October 2009 –we have not decided yet where and are taking proposals from interested universities who want to host the 2009 conference. if you are interested, you drop me a line!

Update: On configurator-database.com, you find a number of MCPC 2007 conference pictures, but -- first of all -- a number of great videos with some prominent participants.

More information:

You still can order the proceedings: They are a pretty expensive 149 USD for the booklet and CD-Rom, but the price included VAT (19% sales tax) and international shipping. The proceedings include many of the papers in full text or extended abstracts, plus access to a special web site with about 40 slide sets of the presentations and the pre-conference workshops.

User Manufacturing and Crowdsourcing in New Zealand: How Ponoko enables creative users to create, manufacture, and sell digital products online

Ponoko is a user manufacturing platform based in Wellington, New Zealand, where anyone can click to make, buy and sell digital products. Users upload designs, Ponoko manufactures them for them using rapid manufacturing technology, and send the result to users. If they like and approve the result, users then can start to sell their designs (and products) to others using Ponoko’s online shop and distribution system. And as in many ventures, the initiator of the business was a frustrated user who could not buy what he wanted to fulfill his needs. After reading about the idea of personal fabrication by Neil Gershenfield at MIT, a business was born.

I asked Dave ten Have, Ponoko's founder and CEO, to describe how the company was founded and what the team wants to achieve. With the help of Steven Kempton , Ponoko’s chief blogging officer, the following guest article came in:

Ponoko was founded on the idea that making or buying individualized products shouldn't be so complex, time-consuming and at a high cost, both financially and environmentally. It should be an enjoyable experience, where you can focus on the design and not be overly limited to what resources, materials or tools you may or may not have or know about.

The idea for Ponoko came from software entrepreneurs Dave ten Have and Derek Elley, both of whom have made a number of things where each experience left a sour taste. A particularly disappointing project was Dave's experience in designing some wall art - a skateboard shape made of dark rich wood with mother of pearl inset designs. This small project took way too much time than Dave had anticipated – two years in fact. It took an incredible amount of phone calls and emails to multiple parties (mostly engineers who didn't have an interest in creativity/art). In the end, it cost a huge amount for an unpleasant making / buying experience – and when it turned up, it was wrong and had to be sent back. The worst part was having to go through the horrid process all over again. (You can see Dave's personal blog for pictures). After this and other disappointing experiences in making individualized projects, they founded Ponoko.

Encouraged by the rise of the Internet connected 'creative-class' along with smarter, faster, smaller and cheaper digital manufacturing hardware (laser cutters, CNC routers and 3D printers that connect to your everyday PC), Dave and Derek formed a plan to solve these problems. They started with the premise that the personal computing and the personal manufacturing industries have strong parallels, realizing that one day everyone will be able to create and make any product from their own home. This led to the idea of mass-individualized products created by the Web community and made on a globally distributed network of manufacturing hardware controlled from any PC.

Today's product making and distribution model is financially and environmentally unsustainable. It's also under pressure to digitize like the music and video industries have. Because today's 100-year old product making and distribution system is so ingrained into our every day lives and delivers so much benefit, problems are not so obvious. But when was the last time you made something?

Making products today does not come easy – some major problems exist:

* Making and delivering (individualized) products is a time consuming, complex and expensive process. This pain does not fit well in a world that is increasingly in demand for instant satisfaction from mass personalized and customized products at low cost.

* Product making and distribution is cost prohibitive for new entrants without relatively deep financial reserves. This is stifling mass creativity of real products and the progress of humanity on unimaginable fronts.

* Low cost mass production and global distribution relies upon using lots of cheap energy and labor. But these two resources are running out.

* Product making and distribution is a major contributor to the global warming problem (according to the WRI, perhaps 20% of the problem). Being environmentally unsustainable, the increasing 'carbon currency' costs also make the current model financially unsustainable.

* Finding individualized products is very difficult and buying such products is a time consuming, relatively complex and expensive burden. Why is there no easy to find supplier of low cost personalized products?

These pressing problems illustrate that a new product making and distribution process is required. Our solution is made possible given the rise of the Internet connected 'creative class' along with digital manufacturing hardware (laser cutters, CNC routers and 3D printers that connect to your everyday PC), and production materials.

The idea of Ponoko is to address these challenges and to deliver the future of product making and distribution to the mass market, today. Ponoko shall deliver the following benefits:

Less risk. On-demand design and manufacture is made possible, so work does not need to be commenced until a consumer makes a purchase. And because product designs can be sold to a large global audience from day one, pay back periods can be shortened.

Lower costs. With Ponoko, creators can now ship digital product designs with the click of a mouse, not physical products requiring a pocket full of cash. This is Apple iTunes for products, but with YouTube style user-generated content.

Instant scalability without cost. Ponoko's distributed manufacturing model means the creator's cost and time frame to manufacture a product for 1 customer is the same as for 1 million customers. Creators can sell millions of products on-demand at 'no' extra cost.

Increased control. Ponoko is specifically designed to provide end-to-end visibility & control over the entire product making and distribution process.

Less complexity. By connecting creators direct with consumers, the traditional supply chain complexity involving a manufacturer, distributor, wholesaler and retailer is eliminated.

But also for consumers, the system has a number of benefits. The main advantage are low cost individualized products. Because no physical product exists until purchase, product design collaboration makes it possible for everyone to co-create and personalize 'almost anything' they need & want. As adoption increases, prices for Ponoko's design-to-order and made-to-order commodity type products will become unrecognizably low.

We are in beta phase at the moment, so if you're interested to find out how this all works and to help us make it the best making/buying experience you've had, please sign up.

Context:
- Ponoko Blog
- Previous posts on the user manufacturing trend
- Neil Gershenfield on personal fabrication

Open Design by Ronen Kadushin

Exhibition of his latest open designs in Appel-Gallery in Berlin, May 12-20, 2007

A frequent topic in my public lectures is the “open design” project by Ronen Kadushin, an Israeli product designer living in Berlin, Germany. Ronen created this product line to close the creative gap between product design and other fields, such as music, graphic design, animation and photography that are traditionally more connected to political, social and economic flows and issues. Inspired by the Open Source movement, he released the designs under a Creative Commons license, which means that you are allowed to reproduce them for personal use. Each design can be downloaded along with a description and a 'blueprint'.

“Industrial design is becoming more and more a toy for rich people … dominated by large names and big companies”, Ronen once explained to me in an interview. Industrial design industry is monopolized by a number of large producers (manufacturing and distributing the designs), focusing on the concepts of less than 150 “famous” industrial designers whose concepts are recognized. All the thousands of other well talented designers are just serving the elite. His intuition was that this system was just producing too much “waste”: Even of the more established designers, only one out of twenty design concepts are becoming products, the rest is just creative waste.

As a result, the concept of Open Design was born. The idea is to find a new logical method how design could be working, using open source software as a working model. His designs are two dimensional "cutout" represented as digital information. It relies on the internet's communication resources, to publish, distribute, and copy the designs under a CreativeCommons deed. Coupled with the flexibility of CNC production methods and their broad availability due to new enablers like emachineshop.com, all technically conforming designs are continuously available for production, in any number, with no tooling investment, anywhere and by anyone.

The latest developments and objects of this project will be exhibited in Berlin in a new exhibition in the Gallery “Appel-Design” (Torstrasse 114, 10119 Berlin Mitte) from May 12 to May 20. Meet Ronen during the exhibition’s opening on May 13, 6pm.

For more information on the exhibition, click on the picture or go to Ronen’s website http://www.ronen-kadushin.com.

CNN on User Manufacturing and Fabbing Your Products at Home

Dean Irvine from CNN Online reports in a recent article on a new project, Fab@Home, that wants to provide a machine that can make anything, even itself -- and this in the comfort of your home. What sounds like the dream of a science fiction author is a device developed at Cornell University by Hod Lipson, Assistant Professor at Cornell's Computing and Information Science department, and Evan Malone, a PhD student.

Lipson and Malone's machine is different to conventional rapid manufacturing technologies in several reasons: First, it can use a number of materials, from plastics to metals with a low melting point. "This makes them useful for making parts or components, but not for making complete systems. We're aiming to make integrated systems, including circuitry and sensors," Lipson is quoted in the article.

Second, the machine is not a proprietary technology, but open source machinery.

DIY fabbers have been able to download plans on how to make their own Fab@Home devices from the web site and are able to build it using off-the-shelf components for around $2000, or buy a kit for $3,000. The machines can then be run from software on a desktop computer. Unsurprisingly the current model is more rudimentary than professional rapid prototyping machines.

Lipson: "Since the machine has been out there people have been experimenting with all sorts of materials including food. We've seen a lot of chocolate, cheese and peanut butter-based creations. This might not be the way the machine is used in the future, but it just goes to show how adaptable and open the creative impetus it is."

Lipson thinks that digital fabrication is currently in a similar situation to that of computers in the 1960s, but instead of kits in the hands of enthusiasts and boffins, the fabbing machines can be developed by creatives across the world thanks to the Internet, freeware and open source software.

"It's a project that will be perfected and improved thanks to the online community of designers and creatives. Getting it into the hands of the people is very important. All the software and components are open source so can be changed or modified according to what people want," he said.

While the machine still is in its early stages of development, the article comments on the potential impact of such a machine. This discussion fits into the vision of user manufacturing. In some quotes in the article, I am saying (please excuse this shameless act of self-promotion):

Piller: "It's hard to say if [Fab@home] will be in everyone's home in the next 20 years. It might follow the same trajectory as the laser printer. Who predicted that nearly every home would have one of them 20 years ago? What is certain is that in the long run it's sure to transform the manufacturing process, big companies won't have to focus so much on economies of scale. ... [For consumers], you won't have to wait for products. It will be similar to being your own publisher online, but with an enormous scope of what you can produce."

And how about replicating some Prada shoes or Aquascutum cuff links, Irvin asks in his article. Well, just look on Google Sketch-up and its repository of 3D designs. you will find an amazing number of reverse engineered IKEA furniture here.

"Already people are customizing designs of existing products, like Ikea furniture, using designs tools and these types of machines. It's small scale now, but if this becomes big, then Ikea are going to step in and say:'Hey, you can't customize our designs.' [But] if they're smart then they'll put these machines in their stores," said Piller.

And the basic idea of the IKEA business model of self assembly would become one of self-design (modification) and self production.

Read the full article here: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/04/26/fs.fabmachine/

Context: - The CNN article refers to a fabbed ladies shoe that is wrongly credited to my group. I wrote about the first laser sintered shoe in this blog, but its inventors and designers are Marc van der Zande from TNO Science and Industry and Sjors Bergmans from Concept Design who developed the shoe in a joint EU-funded project called CEC-made shoes.
- Another nice article about the project.

Recent Partnerships and Acquisitions Provide New Infrastructure For Launching Instant Mass Customization Offerings

It gets easier and easier to open an instant mass customization company. You have a great idea or design that you want to offer customized? But you do not want to mess up with manufacturing, fulfillment, or building a configurator? You are either a large existing brand, mass producer, or an individual consumer?

Never mind, a new bunch of mass customization enablers is helping you to set up instantly a mass customization value chain from design to delivery with a few clicks. Well, this is at least the promise of a number of mass customization enablers that can change the mass customization game.

A partnership by DemandMade with Exclusive Pro and the acquisition of Confego by Zazzle (see the previous two postings) have created integrated mass customization fulfillment systems in the US that can be utilized easily to open a MC or personalization business. Leipzig, Germany, based Spreadshirt offers a similar integrated value chain for the custom apparel business, with a smaller solution space, but an even easier interface to create your own mass customization business.

Years earlier, Germany based Human Solutions already have provided a similar integrated supply chain for custom garments including also custom fit and mass-bespoke tailoring. Their system, however, was based on more formal contracts and a traditional franchise system. It was not as easy to set up as your own customization web store at Spreadshirt or Zazzle.

I am curious to see how these ventures will play off and what kind of services will be enabled in the future. It never has been easier to open a mass customization business … what is happening here is the creation of a common infrastructure, think of a mass customization operation system that enables instant companies and user manufacturing in these domains.

So use these capabilities to create your custom world.

Context:
- Mass Customization Enablers I: Zazzle Acquires Confego to Move the Company beyond BtoC Customization Business
- Mass Customization Enablers II: DemandMade & Exclusive Pro Create Partnership to Deliver a Complete Custom Apparel Solution for Online Retailers
- User Manufacturing: The trend and developments

Mass Customization Enablers II: DemandMade & Exclusive Pro Create Partnership to Deliver a Complete Custom Apparel Solution for Online Retailers

Zazzle-Confego is not the only new partnership this spring. Also the second specialized mass customization enabler in the US, DemandMade , announced a new cooperation to provide a seaming less mass customization value chain by integrating product configuration with a domestic factory & fulfillment.

Hermitage, PA, based DemandMade provides technology and managed services for the complete mass customization value chain including consumer brands and retailers who wish to configure and offer personalized or mass customized products and factories who assemble made-to-order consumer products. The company was founded in 2005 by eBusiness veterans Scott Killian and Tim Brule, who pioneered eCommerce outsourcing when they launched FanBuzz in 1996 and the mass customization process CustomFan in 1999. One of the first online applications of mass customization, CustomFan was used to operate successful online merchandising programs for such brands as Coca-Cola, the National Hockey League, Peanuts, ESPN and the 2002 Olympic Games. The pair later sold FanBuzz to the television shopping network ShopNBC in 2002.

Last week, DemandMade has entered into a partnership with Rockford, IL, based Exclusive Pro, a provider of domestic apparel embellishment and fulfillment services specializing in retail programs using mass customization and personalization. Exclusive Pro's capabilities include full-service, single-piece tackle twill processes (twill, felt and leather), embroidery, heat transfer applications and private labeled fulfillment of single piece orders that are produced on-demand.

“We’ve combined a suite of Web-based tools specifically designed for apparel retailers with a domestic factory that is already using our platform to produce and fulfill single-piece orders,” said Scott Killian, DemandMade CEO, in a press announcement. “The result is a comprehensive solution for online retailers who want to launch a customized apparel or soft goods program.”

The combined offer uses an AJAX-based product configuration engine designed specifically for apparel items that online retailers can integrate with their existing online stores to offer personalized or custom apparel products. On the backend, the configurator is integrated with Exclusive Pro’s domestic production and fulfillment facility -- a complete solution that provides retailers with everything they need to launch a custom apparel program.

Terry Taylor, President of Exclusive Pro, says about his motivation to enter this partnership, “We have a long history of producing orders for single piece garments. However, the demand for our services has shifted dramatically in recent years to online retailers where the dynamic nature of these products can best be presented. This partnership with DemandMade effectively ensures continuity between the online experience and the production process.”

To see an example of the new product configurator, visit www.scenicstore.com/example

Mass Customization Enablers I: Zazzle Acquires Confego to Move the Company beyond BtoC Customization Business

When Brennan Mulligan, founder of Confego, told me that he sold his company to Zazzle, this transaction made a lot of sense for me. With Confego, Brennan had helped other companies like Nike, Rebook, or Timberland, to open mass customization businesses, based on the experiences he gained by working at Timbuk2, the messenger bag customizer, going into business more than 12 years ago (Timbuk2 was founded by Rob Honeycutt).

Confego, a San Francisco Bay Area-based company, has helped in the past years large retail brands to offer customizable versions of their products. The company's primary role is to build and maintain supply chains that are optimized to source customized products quickly and efficiently. While Confego also provided a proprietary, web-based order management software to link contract factories directly to client web sites and other points of purchase, their special focus was more like a boutique consulting firm, helping big brands to understand mass customization in lager detail.

And Zazzle? Like Cafepress or Spreadshirt, at Zazzle http://www.zazzle.com anyone can create and share one-of-a-kind products like apparel, posters, and greeting cards. Zazzle combines on-demand manufacturing, an online community, a huge collection of customizable digital images and different toolkits to empower consumers to create their products. In addition, individuals can choose to become contributors by sharing their unique creations in Zazzle's public galleries. Within these galleries, anyone can browse, comment and connect with others who share their interests. Contributors also earn royalties every time their creations are purchased by others.

So how can this consumer playground ( “Internet's Creativity Marketplace(TM)” is Zazzle’s claim) match to Confego’s boutique BtoB focus? Well, the core of both companies was to enable others to sell custom products, either brands or individual users. And both companies did utilize existing brands: Confego helped large mass production brands to go customization. Zazzle played with brands twofold: First, they used big entertainment brands as part of their merchandising strategy to offer branded images of cartoon characters, movies, etc. Secondly, they created the user brands: Create your stuff, name it, and sell it to everyone.

The Confego acquisition by Zazzle now combines these areas. As a result, Zazzle arrives as a great enabler of customized brands, on the retail, consumer, and merchandising level. And so the press announcement is full of joy:

"This relationship marks the beginning of a new generation of customization for Zazzle," said Robert Beaver, CEO and co-founder of Zazzle.com. "New brand partnerships mean new choices for our customers who are always looking for better means of self expression."

"The creativity of the Zazzle community is a perfect fit with our current offerings," said Brennan Mulligan. "Consumers have come to expect more for their money. The growing availability of fast, easy and affordable customization is empowering shoppers to get exactly what they want, without being force-fed what designers are offering."

And Zazzle gained more: Confego co-founders Brennan Mulligan and David Gross will become part of the Zazzle team. As a pioneer in the field of customization, Mulligan will help Zazzle achieve limitless customization that provides consumers a unique finished product almost immediately and at an affordable price. Confego has perfected the manufacturing and fulfillment process, allowing delivery of custom shoes in just one week, as opposed to the three to five week lead time currently provided from similar vendors. Confego also brings expertise in the customization of the construction of products, including cut, color, fabric choice and custom embroidery.

The next customization trend: Gadget Tattoos -- and how you easily can participate

I was pretty busy with my university job in the last weeks, and so I missed this really interesting story that Springwise reported last week, but that has been around some weeks longer. It is a nice example for this blog as it perfectly mixes its two main trends: mass customization and open (source) innovation:

Adafruit offers custom laser etching of laptops, iPods, phones, cameras and more. Among the hip tech set, laser etching is a next step--somewhere after stickers and custom Timbuk2 laptop messenger bags—focusing on personal flair on top of a laptop, not just it screen (how cool is that: synchronize your desktop image with your laptop case).

Adafruit currently operates in New York and is planning to set up a location in San Francisco early this year. Customers can have a small gadget etched for USD 30, and a laptop for USD 100. Bulk rates and services are available to businesses. To open such a business, is not too difficult: Just get an etching machine, some training and let the crowd come. And it is even easier.

Adafruit is a company with an open source business model: It freely shares its business model with other entrepreneurs interested in setting up a customization shop. The company was launched by Phillip Torrone, senior editor of Make magazine, and Limor Fried. The laser etching machine used by Adafruit is an Epilog, priced at around USD 20,000 and capable of doing highly detailed etching (1200 dpi). If a group of interested etchers organizes in a group to buy the machines in a larger batch, they should be able to make a head start by getting the machine's price down.

So f you're interested in setting up your own laser etching business, contact Adafruit at [email protected].

More information:
Video: one.revver.com/watch/122276
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-6143072.html
http://www.techmeme.com/061212/p70#a061212p70

Finally TIME got it: YOU are the person of the year -- and why Chrysler did not get it

Time Magazine annually claims a "person of the year", and this year it is not Bill Gates or Stalin, but YOU – the creative consumer. While the statement of this claim is more than true and indeed one of the main trends in 2006 (and the topic of this blog and newsletter since 1997), it is not too original.

Business 2.0 run a very similar cover story half a year ago, and before, the Economist and Business Week had similar covers stories in 2005. The article in Time about the story has nothing new, so no further quotes required (even if it really generated a lot of excitement in the blog world, and also many other papers reported about it, like this report in the Spiegel).

But what is much more interesting is this side story. If you want to read the Time article online, you can do so for free, but there in an advertising page first. It features a spot by Chrysler that is supposed to be humorous. It's tag line is "You might be not the person of the year, but you still can drive like one with the Chrysler XYZ". So much about fast response and the need for a new kind of advertising ... Very 1990s.

Context:

Exciting Commerce Blog says User Manufacturing is one of the top topics for 2007

Communities Dominate Brand Blog report about the Time story

And this is a great TIME cover creator – show it your grand ma, she will be impressed!

User Manufacturing: Amazon's Next Twist: Will the Online Retailer Become a Key Enabler of User Manufacturing?

User manufacturing as an alternative model to mass customization – and how this can become the next big trend of user-driven value creation

User manufacturing is an alternative (or supplemental) idea to mass customization, building on the notion that (some!) users are able not only to configure a good within the given solution space of a manufacturer, but also (at least partly) to develop such a solution space by their own. And then transfer their individual creations in a product.

Consider a PC: Most of us are now used to the idea to mass-customize a PC using an online configuration toolkit as, e.g., Dell offers it. Here you can just select what the manufacturer has already provided. Indeed, a main task of a configuration toolkit is to exactly ensure that a custom configuration meets the pre-developed manufacturing specs and design of the producer.

But there are also some more extreme users that really build their own, very custom PCs. They do not just configure what a manufacturer has done, but really craft very individual PCs (see the projects at pimprig.com to see what I mean). In this industry, the actual manufacturing is not too difficult, as PC architectures are modular and build to be interchangeable. But you still need some skills and dedications to do so.

Here now the idea of user manufacturing starts: I have included this within the last year or so frequently in my talks and lectures, but have not blogged too much about it yet. But this posting is the start of a series of articles to formulate this idea better:

User manufacturing (perhaps there is a better term?) is a business model were users (customers) are becoming not only co-designers, but also manufacturers, using an infrastructure provided by some specialized companies.

[Update] User manufacturing is enabled by two main technologies:

(1) Easy-to-operate design software that allows users to transfer their ideas into a design without much experience in how to operate a CAD software. eMachineshop's software is a good example for this (see below). Eric von Hippel called this tools "toolkits for user innovation": Think of mass customization configurators with a much broader solution space.

(2) Easy-to-access flexible manufacturing technology. New manufacturing technologies, first of all rapid manufacturing (e.g., laser sintering or 3D printing) enable users to transfer their ideas into concrete objects -- even of they are no pure digital products. Laser printers made publishing possible for anyone (combined with DTP software to design the stuff). Similarly, future manufacturing technology will make the manufacturing of physical goods possible for everyone.

Well, perhaps not everyone but everyone interested and involved enough with the product to invest the time in the design and manufacturing. At the beginning, user manufacturers will show lead user characteristics, i.e. users that really are ahead of a trend with regard to an application and who really hope to benefit from getting a specific product design. With a continuous improvement of tools and manufaturers, however, user manufacturing will turn mainstream.

This also allows (expert) users to set up an instant company that designs, makes and globally sells physical products could become almost as easy as starting a blog or creating an eBay store — and the repercussions would really change the way we still think about manufacturing today.

In such a world, "user-generated content" would not solely refer to media (blogs, citizen reporters, YouTube movies etc.) but to just about anything: user-generated jeans, user-generated sports cars, user-generated candy bars.

Some examples:

In the world of printed goods, user manufacturing is pretty much established: Companies like Lulu.com enable everyone to become their own publisher and provide publishing and fulfillment infrastructure that up to a few years was only of the hand of a few specialized, huge publishing houses.

eMachineshop.com is a great venture that provides full-scale manufacturing capacity to everyone. Over the internet, users can here access the entire infrastructure that before was only available for "real" manufacturwrs, or demanded complicated and transaction-cost intensive search process for local job shops. But with a very flexible toolkit at eMaschineShop, users now can design their own components and place them on diverse manufacturing outlets.

A similar idea has Big Blue Saw. The company was founded by Simon Arthur, who, as a hobby and later job, build fighting robots for Battlebots, the Robot Fighting League and other robotic sporting events. Doing this, he thought about ways to make it easier for inventors, artists, and hobbyists to create anything using modern machining technology. Big Blue Saw is the result. Its customers can upload their designs to their website. We then make these designs come to life in metal and plastic through the use of advanced robotic machining technology like waterjet cutters.

These companies are doing something really new: They provide technology that before demanded high investments and operating skills not to everyone. Well, everyone that really knows to design and assemble.

To increase the potential of user manufacturing, some other companies come in. They offer not only manufacturing, but also some supporting services. And actually provide a product, but not only components. Consider Crowdspirit. This company tries to provide everyone the capability to become the make of next ipod. Their focus is electronic manufacturing. Springwise recently reported about this idea :

What blogs, citizen journalism and YouTube have done for media, CrowdSpirit hopes to do for product development. ... How it works: Inventors submit ideas for innovative new products and contributors submit problems for inventors to work on. Members vote, define a product's specifications, and can invest money to finance development. After a first prototype has been created, selected members test and help fine-tune in cooperation with manufacturers. Once the stage of product development has been completed, contributors continue to be involved, for example by acting as a product's ambassador and promoting it to retailers, or by providing product support, like translating instruction manuals.

CrowdSpirit's primary focal point is electronics with a market price below USD 190. If all goes well, this will be followed by more expensive electronics, and other sectors as the concept develops. A selection of inventions will be launched in parallel, so that the community can work on several projects at the same time.

And now Amazon:

In an interesting article (thanks to MIT colleague Ethan Mollik for this link!), USA Today technology reporter Kevin Maney places the known activities of Amazon to let others use their infrastructure in the new light of user manufacturing:

"Point, click, make a product to sell to the world ... That's the future Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos hopes to set in motion with the company's new direction. If you tease out Bezos' plan, you get to a point where a high school cheerleader sitting at home with a laptop could theoretically harness computing power, design capabilities, manufacturing and distribution from around the world, and make and market a cute little pink hot rod that would compete against General Motors.

... You can rent space on Amazon's computers to run a business, or rent out its transaction capabilities to sell things and collect money, or rent pieces of its warehouses and distribution system to store and ship items — or all of the above. So, with almost no start-up costs, anyone anywhere could become a retailer. It's not just contracting with Amazon to sell your stuff, the way Target does. It's leasing pieces of Amazon to create something totally unrelated to Amazon. ...

What's new about Amazon is the leap to physical products. This might be one of those evolutionary milestones, like when the first fish crawled up on land, or Jimi Hendrix discovered feedback on his electric guitar and altered the path of rock music.

Amazon's platform will be the first to include physical distribution. "You could notify us to expect inventory from you, tell us when to pick it (from warehouse shelves), and we'll send it to any address," Bezos says. "We've spent 12 years getting good at these things, so why should somebody else have to start from scratch?"

Bezos' idea cracks open an intriguing can of worms. Why shouldn't an established manufacturer do the same, leasing out factory space and industrial design teams and its expertise the same way? Sure, there are limitations. Factories aren't as flexible as warehouses or data centers, which can handle business from just about any industry. So a manufacturer's markets would be narrower. ...

Maybe this trend would not be such bad news for GM. It has excess capacity and nearly 100 years of manufacturing expertise. If it created a carmaking platform, GM could enable the creation of dozens of new niche-market car companies, all using GM to make and distribute their designs."

As Kevin Maney observes, this model is not far afield from today's contract manufacturers in Asia, which make batches of cellphones or toys or shoes on demand for Western brands. User manufacturing would transfer this model to everyone in much smaller batches, using rapid manufacturing technologies and easy, but flexible design tools.

Just imagine what would be possible if Amazon would add to its shared online-selling and distribution capabilities some physical manufacturing capacity as, e.g., offered by e-machineshop (they do this already in the context of book printing with print-on-demand). Then we all could design, click and manufacture a product to sell to the world. Welcome to the world of user manufacturing.

Context information:

- The Elite Vintners wine customization toolkit can be interoreted in this way: This is not a real configurator (as much too complex), but more the provision of the infrastructure of a professional vinery to everyone.

- Spreadshirt, Cafepress and Zazzle enable user manufacturing within a bit more constrained solution space in the fashion industry. They allow much more than the usual t-shirt configurations.

- Tim O'Reilly characterized recently Threadless as a model of user manufacturing, but I disagree. This is crowdsourcing of design, but otherwise a more traditional (if revolutionary) business model. But Tim has a number or other good examples in his post.

- The review of the history of mass customization by Donal Reddingtion also makes this bridge from mass customization to more active users.

- And researchers of user innovation like Eric von Hippel have always noted that innovative (lead) users, who find no manufacturer that would produce their idea, turn themselves into manufacturers. Lead users, however, had to build their own manufacturing capabilities. Here is a great study by Eric with Christoph Hienerth and Clariss Baldwin about this area.

- Books: Neil A. Gershenfeld: FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication. And in GERMAN: Andreas Neef: Vom Personal Computer zum Personal Fabricator, a book on fabbing, rapid manufacturing and new flexible manufacturing technologies.

UPDATES:

- If you live in Singapore, joint this workshop exactly to the topic on Feb. 27, 2007: http://genometri.com/DIY/

- Paul Krush reports his story of opening a user manufacturing service bureau in his new blg.

Printing T-Shirts and Money – Inside Story in the Chicago Tribune on Threadless

The Magazine of the Chicago Tribune, one of the large US quality newspapers, recently featured a LARGE (7 page) cover story on Threadless and their user-design t-shirt business. I talked extensively with Steve Johnson, the article's author, some weeks ago about the business idea behind Threadless. He did a great job in documenting the past, present, and future of Threadless. Read the entire story here.

Here are some interesting quotes from this article:

The Art-Gallery Model.

"They [Threadless] have this innate understanding that what they are really selling isn't a T-shirt so much as the tale of how it came to be, a narrative that involves an artist, a community and a company that sets itself among, rather than above, that community.

"I always compare it to an art gallery," says Nickell, who's 26 and holds the title of president because, in addition to programming the site … and doing designs of his own, he deals with the lawyers and accountants and landlords. "You have people who come in and look at the art, people who made the art, people who are buying the art."

User manufacturing. In the article, Jim Coudal, a Chicago based consultant, summarizes the Threadless model with the great phrase "If they come, we will build it." And indeed, that is some of the quintessence of the Threadshirt business model -- and of other businesses which focus on providing manufacturing capabilities to users:

Threadless is "not building something and selling it to an audience. They're building an audience and selling them what they say they want. .. The Internet has also helped Threadless find and take advantage of the world's "distributed creativity." Just as there are great writers who now have an outlet via blogging, there are great designers who have an outlet via things like the Threadless competition."

Interactive value creation. Steve Johnson then quoted me very neatly, summarizing why Threadless is a perfect example of "interactive value creation":

Distributed creativity "is a very difficult thing to get. In a normal company, you identify the coolest artist and commission him or hire him. What they do is they broadcast their problem: Who makes me the best T-shirt? From an economic point of view, you don't have to know who is the best person. You let them self select. Of course, it only worked because, in their case, they have a lot of desperate artists out there. You have a lot of unemployed graphic design graduates. And they somehow exploited this, but to mutual benefit."

Fashion as Pop-Songs. Patric King, a prominent Chicago designer, compares in the article the Threadless model with a pop song:

"What [Threadless is] doing is just sort of building the wearable equivalent of the pop song," King says. "They throw it up and see what climbs up the Top 40. I've run across a couple of other companies trying to do the same thing, but the work's just not as good. For some reason they just get prettier stuff. Their community has just sort of trained themselves that that's their standard."

A new support industry. Share of labor is the oldest economic principle. And it also helps at Threadless. The article reports about Cody Petruk, a graphic designer for a Canadian software company who owns "about 60" Threadless tees and has seen three of the 13 designs he's submitted get printed. But Petruk also runs a web-site, threadies.org, which supports user designers to participate and win in the Threadless contests. A consultancy for t-shirt designer (McKinsey and BCG, listen!).

The limits of the Threadless model.

"But there are also questions about how much growth a community can endure before it stops feeling like a community. Right now the site is a free-flowing and very entertaining mix of design submissions, which registered users grade on a scale of one to five, blog postings about the designs, links back to other projects and, of course, the store. In a recent week, Nickell says, they had almost 10 million page views from just 500,000 unique visitors.

But already, some longtime site users grumble that as the group has grown, the designs have moved away from their artsy roots and become too cutesy, too clever or too pop. The all-time best-selling Threadless shirt certainly isn't cute. Called "Flowers in the Attic," it depicts a svelte young woman shooting herself in the head, causing birds to fly out. The company has sold 30,000 already, compared to a typical first printing of 1,200 shirts, and is printing another 10,000 for the holiday sales rush."

And the article finishes with a job offer: The Threadless founders are currently considering to hire a COO to run the daily business of the company. Condition: a suit and no t-shirts.

After the article has been published, the Threadless users commented quite enthusiastically. One comment, posted by Radioactivejosh a few hours after the article was published, provides a great perspective why users love Threadless:

"The article hit it right on point; we don't just buy the shirts for the design, but for the story, the meaning, the explanation and the excitement of new prints. It all plays a factor. If I didn't read the explanation of Poet-Trees and I just saw it in Target, it would mean nothing to me. ...

I LOVE when i see people with Threadless tees, because i feel like I know them. They understand the shirts, they visited the site and browsed and saw something they liked. They weren't just trying to be trendy and went into Urban Outfitters ad bought a tee shirt they saw. Threadless tees have a lot more going into them than just buying them."

More information:
- The entire Chicago Tribune article in full text.
- The article with all pictures as an user scan.
- Discussion about the article at Threadless with more customer voices.
- My report on Threadless in this blog
- How Look-Zippy developed the Threadless model further

PS: If you want to know EVERYTHING about the upcoming T-Shirt-Economy: Adam Fletcher, who wrote his master thesis about Threadless and is now working for Spreadshirt, maintains a great blog about t-shirts, with plenty of references to mass customization and user co-design: www.hiphipuk.co.uk

Rapid Manufacturing Platform promotes information and discussion on main technology enabling mass customization

The term rapid manufacturing (RM) refers to the generation of production components either directly on an rapid production machine or as part of the process chain, using similar technologies as known for rapid prototyping. The idea is to produce finished manufactured parts, not prototypes. The benefits of RM over many conventional production processes are easy to appreciate -- it completely removes the expensive process of producing tooling. In principle, parts can be manufactured as soon as the design process has been completed and changed at the touch of a button. This makes RM the perfect manufacturing technology for mass customization in many areas.

But until we are at this state, there are still many steps to go. Most of today's applications involve relatively small quantities of (small) parts. In fact, Terry Wohlers, a leading rapid manufacturing expert, states that it is unlikely that RM will ever reach the production capacity of processes such as injection molding, die casting, or sheet metal stamping. For many mass customization companies this may not matter. Nevertheless, for most organizations RM is still seen as science fiction.

This is why two European research organizations, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft from Germany and TNO from the Netherlands, have initiated the Rapid Manufacturing Platform, an open collaboration platform on the internet to foster exchange of information and knowledge on RM.

Companies and other organizations are invited to visit this virtual counter for all kind of information regarding RM. The website contains publications, case studies and scientific papers to show RM capabilities. There is also a forum to raise a question or start a discussion with experts in the field. The forum is coordinated by Anton Gerrits from TNO [Anton.Gerrits AT tno.nl]. He invites managers and scientist alike to use this forum and contribute with their own material.

Have a look at http://www.rm-platform.com