Disruptive changes in fabrication
My friend the consultant Terry Frasier in his blog recently hit on some of the principles of why companies want to become massive and dominating and how they are threatened by disruption. He was discussing the fascinating new world of personal fabrication -- the existence of machines that allow inventive engineers to create one-off prototypes of their concepts.
Fabrication is the way in which engineering ideas are turned into prototypes for testing and later manufacturing. It is the starting point for all new inventions, from simple hand tools to complex electronic gear. This process is currently expensive, tedious, and frustrating. If you want to design anything, whether simple hardware devices or complex machinery, you have to go through an expensive and error-prone work with a specialist in making prototypes, If you are a few details off or you have miscommunicated, you have to start all over.
The new computer-operated mini-fabricators automate most of the process, allowing the concept person to design a device and have it converted automatically into a real object using vacuum formers, laser cutters, and milling machines. The exciting thing is the affordable price (under $100,000 for the device). How this is done is outside the scope of my comments, but read here and here to get a flavor.
Frazier points out the profoundly disruptive nature of this advance.
The implications for this - the idea that the cost of prototyping is dropping to near zero and tools for design will be understandable and available to anyone with high school-level computer skills - are profound. Today the market is for one-offs - things no big company will make. But in the future this may well replace the R&D and design departments at many, even most, product companies. What has begun to happen to software - small, innovative (and often open source) software companies spring into existence to be quickly bought by big behemoths who can no longer innovate on their own - could well become the norm physical products. Have a better idea for a derailleur shifter on a bike? Prototype it on your own. Designed a spiffy new fuel injector nozzle to drive up fuel mileage? Crank out a few and see if they work.
Terry has been thinking through the implications of my ideas on innovation and bigness as well as those on the snapping up of small companies, and I think he hits the nail on the head here. This technology could usher in a whole new generation of inventors, who won't have to work in GE's or GM's labs in order to have the resources to try out their ideas. Again, as Frazier writes
You need access to massive amounts of capital to test and develop new products. It's this accumulation of capital that allows big corporations to make the rules about what is saleable, profitable, and appropriate. In the future your knowledge of some basic engineering principles combined with a good idea may be all it takes to completely remake a product category. That has to be a scary idea for big corporations everywhere.
I agree except to say that big companies are very adaptable. What hurts them is not that they won't get a price of the products - in the end, they control the channels and that great fuel injector will have to be sold through a big auto maker, that cool pest-control device may have to be distributed through a retail chain. But it will cost them money - it will no longer be the product of work for hire, and the inventor will be able to get a better share of the profits. The temptation for the best minds will be to go on their own.
Nevertheless, the pace of innovation will be out of the hands of the oligopolies for a while. That will cause some serious problems for some companies, the ones that aren't thinking a step ahead of the game.
