OPEN

OK, so this is off-topic, but it’s very cool indeed.

I can’t say I can think of a reason why I would need someone to custom manufacture an object for me. But I still find it strangely reassuring that eMachineShop exists and could laser cut, injection mold or thermoform just about anything that my imagination could come up with.

A while back I read Democratising Innovation by Eric von Hippel, Professor and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management (you can download a .PDF of the book here).

It’s a great read around the broader topic of open source, looking at how innovation models are changing and why people are prepared to share innovations for reasons other than immediate profit.

Refreshingly, Mr von Hippel uses non-IT sector examples for open source innovation, for instance kite-surfing, where innovation is driven by the people who take part in the sport. The equipment that they needed wasn’t available, so people customised and designed their own.

This extended to the point where, using the internet, kite-surfers were sharing open source designs for equipment which third party manufacturers were then producing at a lower cost than firms that were designing and then making kit for the market:

In that industry, the collective product-design and testing work of a user innovation community has clearly become superior in both quality and quantity relative to the levels of in-house development effort that manufacturers of kitesurfing equipment can justify. Accordingly, manufacturers of such equipment are increasingly shifting away from product design and focusing on producing product designs first developed and tested by user innovation communities.