Long Tail of Manufacturing
February 1, 2010 by Raj Sheelvant
I am back from sabbatical. It’s time to start blogging on IT Strategy. Well, I read interesting article in Wired “Next Industrial Revolution Atoms are the New Bits” by Chris Anderson (of Long Tail Fame).
Chris writes that “Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital — the long tail of bits. Now the same is happening to manufacturing — the long tail of things.”
Very astute observation on how the next Industrial revolution will involve mass customization is might be happening in a garage next to yours. With the cost of 3D printing, prototyping continuing to fall, number of small companies can now enter Manufacturing space. Chris writes that when the monolithic industries fragments in the face of countless small entrants leads to lowering the barriers to entry and the crowd pours in. Same phenomenon of crowd sourcing that revolutionized Web (Web 2.0) has started to happen in Manufacturing (Manufacturing 2.0). Using the collaborative tools, experts, prosumers and hobbyists can be leveraged to build niche products. Same web technology gives one an access to customers worldwide.
The other factor that has accelerated the move to Manufacturing 2.0 is the economic crisis/credit crisis of 2008. It has, according to the article, triggered an extraordinary shift in the business practices of (mostly) Chinese factories, which have become increasingly flexible, Web-centric, and open to custom work. This in turn enables ‘one man’ manufacturing clients to custom build their innovation.
We now have a perfect recipe in place for Cottage Manufacturing Renaissance!
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