What happens when you try to combine a gamelan with a celeste? It's never been done before, so who knows?
As Björgvin Tómasson can tell you, what you get is a "gameleste". This combination makes it a hybrid, something new under the sun. It was built to be a part of Björk's intriguing Biophilia project, which looks to be a pretty stunning effort — I certainly want to make it to one of her concerts!
I find this video very affirming. Here's what it says to me: when trying to bring something new to life, you will be faced with many challenges. Friends will question your vision, lawyers will come up with a million reasons why you shouldn't do what you want to do, and money people will demand the right to dig up your precious little seed of an idea each day to ensure that it's growing (they have to be sure to get their full money's worth, you know).
In response, just start. Plunge in. Create. Excessive talking and planning is a sign that you are stuck in an emotional-intellectual mire of your own making. That mire gets its power from our fear of the unknown. In order to break its grip, you need to start – anywhere. It's hard to break out of, for sure. But we can all do it. How did Björgvin Tómasson manage to figure out what a gameleste would be like when it did not exist? By starting, by making it. And now we all also know what a gameleste is all about, for the person who acts not only brings a new thing to life, but brings all of us along, too.
I've spoken here many times about the power of experiential learning. For many activities, learning by doing is an extremely sticky way to become adept at a new skill. The difference between reading about surfing, watching a video about surfing, and actually taking a class where you get up on the board (and get really wet, too!) is profound. The former two provide you with lots of information about surfing, while the latter earns you true know-how about how to carve your wave through the water. Deep know how is the killer app for folks who want to make an impact in the ring, as opposed to being spectators or pundits watching from outside.
But, what about computer simulations? While they cannot model all aspects of an activity which takes place in the physical world, computers provide us with the opportunity for deep experiential learning, albeit with less fine-grained resolution than one would encounter in real life. However, as they are not in fact real life, simulations can liberate us from the fear one encounters when immersed in difficult real life situations, such as being the leader of a group of people for the first time, or engaging in a dangerous physical activity. Computer simulations can also provide us with access to learning scenarios which otherwise would be out of our reach due to limitations of time, physics, and money.
Joi Ito has spoken extensively about the power of the game World of Warcraft as a training environment for people interested in developing the skills needed to lead diverse groups of people in conditions of great uncertainty. John Seely Brown has also written some persuasive essays on this subject, and here is an excerpt from one of them:
When role-playing gamers team up to undertake a quest, they often need to attempt particularly difficult challenges repeatedly until they find a blend of skills, talents, and actions that allows them to succeed. This process brings about a profound shift in how they perceive and react to the world around them. They become more flexible in their thinking and more sensitive to social cues. The fact that they don't think of gameplay as training is crucial. Once the experience is explicitly educational, it becomes about developing compartmentalized skills and loses its power to permeate the player's behavior patterns and worldview.
In this way, the process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a total-immersion course in leadership. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. Guilds routinely splinter over petty squabbles and other basic failures of management; the master must resolve them without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Never mind the virtual surroundings; these conditions provide real-world training a manager can apply directly in the workplace.
I wholeheartedly agree with Ito and Brown, and am of the opinion that many aspiring real-world project leaders would do well to log some hours learning to lead multi-player quests and raids in Warcraft. Polyphony's Gran Turismo is another great computer simulation from a sticky learning perspective, as it allows one to get a sense of what it feels like to drive a variety of cars fast — very fast — around a multitude of road courses. For a few hundred bucks, it allows almost anyone to gain elements of experience which heretofore were only available to person blessed with thousands and thousands of dollars in discretionary income — as well as the willingness to get really hurt if things were to go all pear-shaped.
Enter Lucas Ordoñez, Spanish MBA student and Gran Turiso aficionado. A few years ago, Ordoñez entered the GT Academy competition organized by Polyphone and Sony, which allowed him to pit his virtual driving skills against 25,000 other competitors, each one seeking to win a full scholarship for further real-world training in racing cars, culminating in the acquisition of a license granting entry into the world of professional racing. Ordoñez had gained experience racing go karts as a kid, but picked up his auto racing miles via Gran Turismo. For those of you who aren't familiar with Gran Turismo, here's a quick video of him "racing" around a famous track you'd find in Germany:
Long story short, Ordoñez beat the odds and topped the Academy, beating out 24,499 other aspiring Sennas. Here's a video showing what happened when he entered his first "real" race:
Pretty cool, eh?
But wait, it gets better: after more experiencing more racing success, Ordoñez was offered a ride in the vaunted 24 Hours of Le Mans race — a truly spectacular opportunity for any racer, let alone one that's been doing it for less than three years. And guess what, he did really well. Not only did he and his team finish the entire 24 hours, an incredible achievement on its own, they took second place in class, earning the right to stand on the champion's podum. Really, really amazing, especially considering that Ordoñez brought much less "experience" to the team than any of the other traditionally-trained racers he competed against. This video gives a wonderful sense of the magnitude of this achievement:
My point here isn't to claim that video games change everything. They don't. Far from it. But I do think that we can all stand to learn more about the world we live in by selectively choosing to spend more time with the high-quality games that really do put us in new learning situations. Curiousity can be stoked and satisfied in myriad ways, so can't we all agree to move beyond the snobbery of the book and the university lecture and the formal training class to see the latent potential embedded in our silicon machines and the software that makes them sing? This is the message of the ballad of Lucas Ordoñez… I can't wait to see where life next takes him.
About 18 years ago I dropped out of graduate school at Stanford and took a job as an R&D engineer at Hewlett-Packard Company. Actually, "dropped out" is a bit too strong of a phrase; it was late June, I had just just won my Stanford undergraduate degrees a few weeks before, I was about to start my summer internship at NASA, it was hot out, and my new dorm room (Rains housing, for those of you in the know) was even hotter, and I was already sick of hearing cars downshifting for the stop sign just outside of my window. Classes for my masters program in mechanical engineering wouldn't start for a few more months, but the prospect of yet another math class didn't feel like a Big Idea to me. I forget the the exact chain of events, but I believe I first called Ford to ask (beg) for the job I had turned down a few months earlier, and then coincidentally someone from Hewlett-Packard called me to see if I would be interested in a position with them up in Vancouver, Washington, having passed their grueling phone interview screen a few months earlier.
So.
I flew up to Portland, Oregon to interview with Hewlett-Packard, partly because I was desperate to get out of my room at Stanford and partly because I had never been to a CART race, and there was one happening the coming weekend, which was June 27 (what — you think I've changed? This one-track mind has taken years to develop). The job interviews went well, and the race was pretty cool (the good folks at Hewlett-Packard allowed me to keep the rental car for the weekend), if I must say so:
The visit went well, I took the job, and in doing so became a very proud member of the Hewlett-Packard family, starting as a R&D Engineer working on ink-jet printing systems. I enjoyed what in retrospect was an amazing two years, though I probably didn't fully appreciate everything at the time because I was relatively impatient from a career standpoint. All things being equal, over my two years there, I was able to do foundational R&D work on what became HP's "off-axis" ink system (which you can stilll find in any large-format printer today), got to help take a new printer up the manufacturing ramp, was allowed to redesign a bunch of parts for another new printer, and was also asked to do some cool user research in the field, including one home visit in Wisconsin where I ended up helping some kids with their homework.
The best thing about working at Hewlett-Packard was its culture, which was very "adult" in the sense that it was built on a sense of deep trust and respect between individuals and groups within the company. One day I was using spray-mount glue in my cubicle (bad idea) and my manager stopped by, poked his head in, and said something to the effect of "You can pretty much do anything you want here unless you're endangering yourself or others, and right now you're endangering yourself or others," and then he walked away. Lesson learned. Working at Hewlett-Packard meant that I had the good fortune of working for some truly spectacular managers and mentors, such as Eric Ahlvin, Alan Shibata, David Gast, and Rick Berriman. Looking back on my time there, I realize now the degree to which I imprinted on these people and on Hewett-Packard's culture. In my approach to work and working with people, I think I've tried hard to live up to the examples they set for me, as well as the ethos that informed the culture of Hewlett-Packard.
The best summary of the culture I experienced at Hewlett-Packard is summed up in the 11 Simple Rules drawn up by David Packard himself. These are:
1. Think first of the other fellow. This is THE foundation — the first requisite — for getting along with others. And it is the one truly difficult accomplishment you must make. Gaining this, the rest will be "a breeze."
2. Build up the other person's sense of importance. When we make the other person seem less important, we frustrate one of his deepest urges. Allow him to feel equality or superiority, and we can easily get along with him.
3. Respect the other man's personality rights. Respect as something sacred the other fellow's right to be different from you. No two personalities are ever molded by precisely the same forces.
4. Give sincere appreciation. If we think someone has done a thing well, we should never hesitate to let him know it. WARNING: This does not mean promiscuous use of obvious flattery. Flattery with most intelligent people gets exactly the reaction it deserves — contempt for the egotistical "phony" who stoops to it.
5. Eliminate the negative. Criticism seldom does what its user intends, for it invariably causes resentment. The tiniest bit of disapproval can sometimes cause a resentment which will rankle — to your disadvantage — for years.
6. Avoid openly trying to reform people. Every man knows he is imperfect, but he doesn't want someone else trying to correct his faults. If you want to improve a person, help him to embrace a higher working goal — a standard, an ideal — and he will do his own "making over" far more effectively than you can do it for him.
7. Try to understand the other person. How would you react to similar circumstances? When you begin to see the "whys" of him you can't help but get along better with him.
8. Check first impressions. We are especially prone to dislike some people on first sight because of some vague resemblance (of which we are usually unaware) to someone else whom we have had reason to dislike. Follow Abraham Lincoln's famous self-instruction: "I do not like that man; therefore I shall get to know him better."
9. Take care with the little details. Watch your smile, your tone of voice, how you use your eyes, the way you greet people, the use of nicknames and remembering faces, names and dates. Little things add polish to your skill in dealing with people. Constantly, deliberately think of them until they become a natural part of your personality.
10. Develop genuine interest in people. You cannot successfully apply the foregoing suggestions unless you have a sincere desire to like, respect and be helpful to others. Conversely, you cannot build genuine interest in people until you have experienced the pleasure of working with them in an atmosphere characterized by mutual liking and respect.
11. Keep it up. That's all — just keep it up!
Wow. These 11 principles are simultaneously super inspirational and super humbling. Truth be told, on my bad days I fail to live up to all of these. But I try, and I keep trying to improve myself vis a vis this list, and I think that was the magic of Hewlett-Packard's culture, which allowed you — even encouraged you — to improve yourself just as you were always trying to improve the stuff sitting on your test bench. And it encouraged you to help the folks around you, too. What I find interesting about Packard's points is that, starting with No.1, they're all focused on the people around you, not on your inner dialog or whatever. If you're seeking to establish and maintain a collaborative, innovative culture, you could do a lot worse than to follow these 11 points.
I wrote this post this evening because earlier today I learned that David Kelley modeled much of IDEO's culture on that of Hewlett-Packard. I left Hewlett-Packard to join IDEO, and in many ways I regard IDEO as a logical extension of Packard's cultural vision. Trust and respect for your fellow colleagues are indeed the pillars of cultures which routinely create high-impact innovations.
Many thanks to my friend Bob Sutton for telling me about David Packard's Simple Rules.
"I’m convinced that for an existing company to innovate, they must first make the decision to get rid of something. Unless you get rid of it, it will always be more a more compelling argument to improve the old rather than commit to the new. That small decision over time adds up to a total deflection, and you are never as motivated to innovate as the unencumbered new entrant."
My original working title for Innovation Principle 20 was "Don't settle". This principle was inspired by one of my colleagues at IDEO, who has showed me again and again the value created by not giving up on an idea until the quality of its expression matches the magnitude of its potential.
I evolved the messaging of Principle 20 to "Be remarkable" because I wanted it to feel more aspirational and open-ended, but it some ways I always go back to the phrasing "don't settle" in my head. To be honest, I've been struggling with the wording on this one. Is it about being remarkable? Or is about sticking to your guns, never letting anything go? While I'm a firm believer in embracing mediocrity in order to get the ball rolling, I'm also a stickler for doing amazing stuff. Are these two at all compatible?
When I read this article about chef Daniel Boulud a couple of years ago, I filed it away under the heading "don't settle". I just took another look at it, and noted this passage:
But during Round 8 of recipe tests, on Tuesday, he refuses to grade on the curve. He stoically appraises entrees and appetizers in what feels like a marathon episode of “Top Chef” — except that this judge has helped conceive the dishes and never seems very pleased by the results.
The lamb ribs confit with roasted lamb leg and spring beans? “Maybe a little more herbs in it,” he suggests. The Maryland lump crab cake with a curry sauce and pickled radish? “More crab, less garnish.” The passion fruit crepe with mango slices? “We’re still not there.”
We sit across from Mr. Boulud, shamelessly pillaging the leftovers and thinking: huh? Each dish seems head-spinningly yummy, but Mr. Boulud summons enthusiasm only when he tries a sausage called the Vermonter, and he cracks a smile only after a forkful of beer-battered haddock beignets.
“I think it’s good,” he says, like a man enjoying a guilty pleasure.
This excerpt hints at the relationship between "don't settle" and "be remarkable". When it comes to the lamb and the crab cake and the fruit crepe, he's saying "keep working on it — not remarkable enough yet". Not settling. But when he tastes something over the bar, such as the beer-battered fish beignets, he celebrates the outcome. I think that's the key: if you don't have the honesty to recognize something remarkable when it happens, people around you will think nothing will ever make you happy, and from that point forward you'll always be operating in a climate of fear. And a working climate infused with fear never ever never ever takes us to a happy place:
This principle is about a stepwise journey toward a remarkable endpoint. It is fueled by trust, a trust that none of us will settle for anything less than being remarkable. But it also requires a shared trust that it is okay to deliver an interim step that is less than perfect. In other words, we need to be okay with each of us failing as individuals if we're ever going to reach somewhere remarkable together. I can't imagine that perfect fish-flavored beignets could ever happen right on the first shot, you know?
Stanford's alumni magazine, titled — you guessed it! — Stanford Magazine, ran a great story on the d.school a few weeks ago. The article speaks with my teacher/mentor/colleague/friend/hero David Kelley and others about not only the d.school, but on living your life well, and on the notion of achieving creative confidence (here's a secret: those last two items are deeply related).
It's definitely worth your time to read through the article. I really liked this quote from Stanford President John Hennessy:
Creativity represents an important characteristic that we would seek to inculcate in our students, and obviously one that's harder to put a firm framework around. It's unlike teaching some analytical method. Will a bridge stay up? Well, we know what to teach. You teach physics, you teach some mathematics and you can do the analysis.
It's much harder to teach creativity. [It involves] multiple routes, multiple approaches and, obviously, it's virtually impossible to test whether or not you've succeeded. The measure of success is likely to come long after, not unlike many of the other things we try to teach: To prepare students to be educated citizens, to prepare them for dealing with people from diverse and different walks of life. Those are things that play out over a long time, whether or not we've done a good job.
During my time as an undergraduate at Stanford, I was very fortunate to be able to pursue two degrees, obtaining both a bachelor of science in engineering and a bachelor of arts in a multidisciplinary program called Values, Technology, Science and Society [VTSS] (it is now called STS and is one of the biggest programs on campus, though when I was there it was quite small). I spent a lot of time in the library. Though VTSS sounds like something very technical in nature, it was actually an incredibly rich humanities experience, with a focus on topics which, if you've spent any time around this blog, you know that I love. For example, my honors thesis was on the origins and development of the Ferrari aesthetic, looking at how meaning was created in Maranello via the mechanisms of storytelling, racing, and panel beating. My VTSS teachers were an incredible group of people, really inspirational, and they helped me build up my creative confidence in myriad ways. VTSS also gave me a way to take all of the product design classes with David Kelley which I otherwise would not have been able to do had I just pursued my engineering degree alone.
I bring all of this up because I do feel that Professor Kelley helped, in Hennessy's words, to prepare me to be an educated citizen, to prepare me for dealing with people from diverse and different walk of life. If the d.school had been around while I was there, I wouldn't have had to get the two degrees (though I would have anyway, as I'm always "doing both"). For me, as someone who was part of the founding team at the d.school, and who remains extremely passionate and optimistic about its mission and potential in the world — it is an experiment still in its very early days — it's very gratifying to see that mission be couched in these terms. Ultimately, we are not teaching folks to be designers, we are helping them realize their potential as citizens and as happy, productive human beings. Awesome.
I'll leave you with this recent d.school video which has students telling it all in their own words:
As you know, for the past year or so I've been playing around with the notion that an essential — even critical — element in any successful creative endeavor is the existence of a crisp point of view to guide decision making along the way. A point of view is statement of what something must be, and in that declaration lies an exhaustive list of everything which it cannot be. A point of view allows for consistent choices to be made, which lead to coherent, strong end results. When something is criticized for feeling like it was created by a committee, it's not so much the committee per se which is at fault, so much as the absence of any unifying principle to guide the actions of individuals in the name of creating a sum total which is truly remarkable. In terms of outcomes, having a strong point of view is the difference between the music of an ensemble led by Charlie Hunter and the stuff you'd hear in an elevator. There's nothing wrong with group creativity, but it needs to have a point of reference for goodness navigation.
Which brings me back to the Coppola interview. While I've never made a motion picture, I always watch the credits, and I'm always amazed at how even a film with a modest production budget can employ so many people. How can they all know what to do? What good looks like? How to make the myriad brilliant decisions that lead to something being truly remarkable? Here's what Coppola says, and it's totally about point of view:
When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality.
The reason it’s important to have this is because most of the time what a director really does is make decisions. All day long: Do you want it to be long hair or short hair? Do you want a dress or pants? Do you want a beard or no beard? There are many times when you don’t know the answer. Knowing what the theme is always helps you.
I remember in “The Conversation,” they brought all these coats to me, and they said: Do you want him to look like a detective, Humphrey Bogart? Do you want him to look like a blah blah blah. I didn’t know, and said the theme is ‘privacy’ and chose the plastic coat you could see through. So knowing the theme helps you make a decision when you’re not sure which way to go.
One word. I love the idea of boiling the point of view down to one word. An exhaustive written treatment of the point of view would be read by few, internalized by even fewer. But a single word? Think of the last US presidential election, and you can see the power of a single word to communicate an entire political platform: Hope. And because creative endeavors ever love constraints, the specificity of a single word will engender mountains more creativity than a list of ten or a hundred or a thousand. Transparent plastic rain coats don't just happen, you know.
As it turns out, astonishing things. Particularly if you've accumulated the data with a strong point of view behind your gathering endeavors, as Deb Roy has done over the past three years:
Wow! I hope you were able to watch through to the end — those last few minutes are magic.
As is the case with the Salman Khan video I wrote about last week, Deb Roy's massive collection of video data is an example of a real option at work. By taking the time to develop, install, and maintain these data recording systems, Roy and his team of researchers opened themselves up to myriad opportunity streams, some predictable, some serendipitous. They certainly created value far beyond the costs associated with gathering up 200 terabytes of data! The result is breathtaking, remarkable, and takes our culture to a new place.
What if all of the big intitatives — both public and private — put into place over the past decade to computerize learning were trumped by a smart, funny, personable guy who, acting largely alone and on a shoestring budget, used a human-centered approach to creating a simple, cost-effective way to reach thousands and thousands of students over the web? And what if it all happened simply because he started teaching kids?
Well, here you go: Salman Khan did all of that, and more. He is a wonderful example of the primacy of doing.
Let's look at some of the innovations brought to market by the Khan Academy. Among others:
free access over the internet
self-paced learning
lecture attendance at home, homework at school
the psychological and emotional safety created by learning in private
helping students achieve true mastery, as opposed to minimum tolerable levels of understanding
liberating "slow" students from the tyrranny of being put on the low achievement track
a more human classroom experience
What do all of these have in common? Well, aside from being truly amazing outcomes for students, teachers, and parents, none of them were captured in a business plan slide deck, nor were they necessarily premediated goals for his venture. In other words, Salman didn't start out with the goal to flip the learning paradigm. He worked his way up to that point by doing something he loved. To push that point even further, Sallman wasn't looking to start a venture at all, just to tutor his cousins more effectively. He designed for them, saw the value he created, and then went from there.
Embracing the primacy of doing, getting started, saying "what the hell, why don't I try this!" is a way to open yourself up to powerful forces of serendipity, luck, and good fortune. In technical terms, doing gives you access to a real option, which is defined as:
the right — but not the obligation — to undertake some business decision; typically the option to make, abandon, expand, or contract a capital investment.
Think about it: if you could create the right to give yourself an expanded range of opportunities in the future, wouldn't you give that gift to yourself? Of course you would. So what Salman teaches us is that we need to act — we have to act — because inside of that action is a gift of a better future, both for ourselves and for others. Accessing the gift requires some courage, so tell yourself you can do it, and help your friends and family to embrace their own potential to get out there and make it happen. For me, that's the ultimate lesson of the Khan Academy.
For those of us who make things for a living, we live a daily pardox in that most of our making actually involves subtracting. That gorgeous MacBook Air you covet? It was made subtractively: lots of perfectly good aluminum was machined away to achieve its seductive form. Unfortunately, many of the miraculous fixes surgeons create actually involve taking out living material, and either setting up a workaround using existing components, or placing in a replacement part — like an artificial hip — which was probably made subtractively, too. Even a quotidien net-shape process like thermoplastic injection molding requires the creation of complex metal molds, which are also usually made via subtractive processes, all of which are quite laborious and time consuming.
We're on the cusp of a significant shift in manufacturing techniques which has been several decades in the making. As a newly minted engineer back in the early 90's, I started using 3D CAD software to drive stereolithography machines which gave me rough samples of the parts I was designing for ink jet printers. Stereolithography was an early form of "additive" manufacturing, where you build up the thing you desire layer by layer, drip by drip, or atom by atom. Though the parts weren't very functional, they were a great alternative to asking someone to machine out your impossible shape (I was very good then at creating impossible shapes…). What's cool today is that variants of the same ink jet technology I was developing then can now be used to print out… kidneys. Or bikes. And urethras. Or even plastic injection molds. And going forward, potentially just about anything we can dream up. For me, I think this shift in manufacturing paradigm will be driven by three major developments in the art and science of making stuff:
1. Cost-effective production of complex composite forms and structures
Save for their motors and wheels, modern Formula 1 cars are made almost completely out of a variety of composite materials. As you can see from the crash sequence above (which the driver Mark Webber walked away from), composite materials combine light weight with very high strength. The composite tub which Webber sits in stayed intact throughout this accident. He is also wearing an advanced, lightweight helmet made out of composites. And his head is kept attached to his torso by a composite yoke sitting on his shoulders. However, the manufacturing techniques used to create all of these parts are slow and expensive. To date, the use of composite materials in mass consumer offerings has been limited to things like tennis raquets and golf clubs, where the forms and structures were fairly simple and the market was willing to pay a premium for performance. Boeing is about to ship the Dreamliner, whose fuselage and wings are made out of composites. Cost-effective, lightweight composites would be a boon to the automotive world, enabling us to create much more energy efficient cars which maintain or increase levels of active and passive safety over today's metallic structures. The good news here is that several organizations are pioneering manufacturing techniques which radically lower the price of composite structures. Gordon Murray's design firm has created the iStream manufacturing process, which combines steel structures with a fast composite manufacturing techniques to create a cheap, lightweight stucture for vehicles. And McLaren, ever an innovator, is just about to ship its amazing MP4-12C road car, which uses a cost-effective molded carbon fiber tub as its main structural element. Here is a technical analysis of that car, and here is an overview of the state of the art in structural composites by Gordon Murray himself. As more of these manufacturing techniques come into the mainstream, we'll see composites in more and more products. Significantly, these processes also have the potential to significantly reduce the physical footprint required to make things, and they can also skinny down the capital structure required to be a manufacturer. More on that in the next section.
2. Additive manufacturing of technical nutrients
By this title, I refer to the process of building up structures by depositing incremental bits of "man-made" materials until a whole is formed. This is in contrast to traditional manufacturing techniques, where material is slowly stripped away, Michelangelo-like, until the desired form is achieved. For more information on this, rather than attempt to duplicate a wonderful piece of journalism, I'd like to point you to 3D printing: The printed world, an article from The Economist. For both both noobie and expert alike, this article provides a great survey of techniques and applications being developed all over the world. If you're an engineer like me, the prospect of being able to additively manufacturing a titanium spar inside of a fully-formed carbon fiber wing is truly inspiring. On the other hand, if you are a business model hacker like me, you'll also find the following Economist observation pretty mind-blowing:
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of additive manufacturing is that it lowers the cost of entry into the business of making things. Instead of finding the money to set up a factory or asking a mass-producer at home (or in another country) to make something for you, 3D printers will offer a cheaper, less risky route to the market. An entrepreneur could run off one or two samples with a 3D printer to see if his idea works. He could make a few more to see if they sell, and take in design changes that buyers ask for. If things go really well, he could scale up—with conventional mass production or an enormous 3D print run.
This suggests that success in manufacturing will depend less on scale and more on the quality of ideas. Brilliance alone, though, will not be enough. Good ideas can be copied even more rapidly with 3D printing, so battles over intellectual property may become even more intense. It will be easier for imitators as well as innovators to get goods to market fast. Competitive advantages may thus be shorter-lived than ever before. As with past industrial revolutions, the greatest beneficiaries may not be companies but their customers. But whoever gains most, revolution may not be too strong a word.
If you could make world-class titanium parts in your backyard studio, would you? I might. If you are GM, and you can start replacing huge buildings built to house humongous steel panel stamping presses with robotic cells which build up parts additively, would you? I believe the capital efficiencies offered by these new technologies will be irresistable, and will transform the notion of "factory" to be something much smaller, more nimble, and more similar to the low mass organization we've seen develop to support many of the leading Web 2.0 brands. I saw an inkling of this eight years ago, when I visited the Pagani factory in Italy. At that point in time, they were not using additive manufacturing, but they were building all of their parts (save for the engine and some assorted metallic suspension pieces) inhouse using carbon composite manufacturing techniques. Here's what I wrote about that visit:
Located a short drive outside of Bologna, Pagani sits but a stone's throw from the headquarters of Ferrari and Lamborghini — part of the high performance internal combustion industry cluster that's existed in Emilia-Romagna since the 1920's. The factory is very compact and sits, almost invisible, in a quiet suburban neighborhood. It is divided into three main areas, each sitting side-by-side: a carbon fiber fabrication area with several autoclaves, an assembly area (big enough to fit three cars on jack stands) and an entrance lobby/museum. The design offices sit above the museum, and the entire facility oozes quality and attention to detail, as do the fabulous cars that roll out the front door.
Three tiny buildings creating complete cars. A factory complex so small I drove by it at least five times, finally resorting to begging two mechanics in a garage fixing an old Fiat 500 to point me in the right direction. That's a big revolution in capital structure, and I believe it will signal the birth of many small, leightweight, easier-to-start-up entrepreneurial manufacturing firms. Our industrial landscape may return to looking much like that of over a century ago, with as many exciting mechanical startups flourishing as we now have software startups. By the way, the illustration above is also from — you guessed it — Gordon Murray.
3. Additive manufacturing of biological nutrients
Here I refer to the process of building up structures by depositing incremental bits of "natural" materials until a whole is formed. Or it may mean creating a scaffolding out of man-made or biomaterials, and then injecting that scaffolding with living cells so that it can grow to become a liver, or a urethra, or a bladder, or a kidney. Since showing is better than telling, please give yourself 17 minutes to watch the following TED video — it will blow your mind and may change the way you approach your work:
If you can't spare the time for the entire video, at least forward to the 10 minute mark in the video, and check it out. Amazing. By the way, this type of manufacturing approach will also change the business structures of many of the organ replacement systems we have in place today. Contrast the complex supply chains we've created to harvest viable organs from donors, find a suitable recipient, and then transport and implant the donation. Aside from reducing the human misery and suffering accrued (which cannot be measured in dollars), imagine what happens when Stanford Hospital has an organ printing center in the basement.
This shift in our manufacturing paradigm will be enabled cheap, lightweight structures, built-up physical products, and custom-printed biologic offerings. In summary, this is just my attempt to synthesize for myself what may be happening across these trends. The technological possibilities are fabulous. The business implications are intriguing and even inspiring. The societal implications are simultaneously energizing and troubling. Let's see where things go, and I'd love to hear what you think.
