Capítulo 1
The Digital Revolution Comes Home: How Anyone Can Now Make Anything
In 1926, my grandfather Fred Hauser emigrated from Switzerland to Los Angeles, transforming his garage into an inventor's workshop by night while working at MGM Studios by day. His breakthrough came with patent #2311108 for an automatic sprinkler system that used a clock face with pins to trigger water valves. Despite this innovation, he faced the industrial limitations of his era - without manufacturing capabilities, inventors had to license their ideas to companies, surrendering control. Though Moody eventually produced his invention as the Rainmaster, earning him royalties until the 1970s, this success story was rare. The gap between invention and entrepreneurship was vast in the pre-digital era, requiring privilege or extraordinary luck to bridge. Today, this barrier has collapsed. Makers: The New Industrial Revolution has become required reading for entrepreneurs and innovators worldwide, with Elon Musk citing it as inspiration for Tesla's manufacturing approach. The book predicted the explosion of 3D printing, crowdfunding, and digital manufacturing that has since transformed industries from automotive to healthcare.
Capítulo 2
From Garage Tinkering to Global Movement
The Maker Movement represents a fundamental shift in how we create physical goods. What began as hobbyists experimenting with digital fabrication tools has evolved into a worldwide phenomenon with nearly a thousand "makerspaces" - shared production facilities - globally. Shanghai alone is building one hundred such spaces, while TechShop creates gym-style membership workshops nationwide. Online marketplaces like Etsy host nearly a million sellers who sold over $500 million in handmade products in 2011.
What makes this movement revolutionary is its three transformative characteristics: people using digital desktop tools to create and prototype designs; a cultural norm of sharing these designs in online communities; and common file standards allowing anyone to send designs to commercial manufacturing services. This dramatically shortens the path from idea to entrepreneurship.
The implications extend far beyond hobbyists. Manufacturing remains essential to national strength, comprising about a quarter of the U.S. economy and three-quarters when including distribution and retail. Despite the digital economy's prominence, our commercial lives exist primarily in the physical world of atoms, not bits. Yet manufacturing employment has declined to century-long lows due to Asian cost advantages.
The solution isn't returning to giant factories but creating a new manufacturing economy that's bottom-up, distributed, and entrepreneurial - more like the Web itself. Manufacturing has become digital, networked and increasingly open, working at any scale from single units to millions. Modern CAD tools allow designers to choose between "print local" (prototyping on desktop fabricators) or "print global" (sending to service bureaus for volume production) with a simple menu option, compressing three centuries of industrial revolution into a single mouse click.
Imagine reimagining my grandfather's automatic sprinkler invention today. Rather than patenting and licensing it to manufacturers, we'd create an "OpenSprinkler" - internet-connected, smartphone-controlled, and open-source. This system would know weather forecasts to optimize watering, feature an intuitive interface, and allow community modifications. The entire project would cost less than $5,000 to bring to market, compared to the expensive patent and manufacturing process my grandfather faced. Today, you can buy an OpenSprinkler kit for just $79.95 - a fraction of what proprietary systems cost.
Capítulo 3
Industrial Revolutions: Past and Future
The current maker revolution mirrors the transformative power of the original Industrial Revolution. In 1766, weaver James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny after seeing a fallen spinning wheel continue operating on its side. His pedal-powered machine allowed one person to spin eight threads simultaneously, dramatically amplifying productivity. This invention helped launch an industrial revolution because it used widely available cotton, featured scalable mechanisms that could utilize increasing power sources, and emerged during Britain's intellectual renaissance when patent laws incentivized both invention and sharing.
The impact was profound. Between 1700-1850, Britain's population tripled, and over two centuries, average per capita income grew tenfold - unprecedented in human history. People moved from rural mud cottages to brick buildings, wore mass-produced cotton clothing that was easier to clean, enjoyed better diets from increased income, and accessed better healthcare in cities. Between 1800 and today, Western life expectancy doubled from 38 to 76 years, primarily because people grew healthier as they grew richer, their abilities amplified by machines.
The Second Industrial Revolution (1850-WWI) brought steam-powered transportation, mass steel production, and eventually Henry Ford's assembly line with interchangeable parts and conveyor belts. These innovations fundamentally transformed society by freeing humans from manual labor, allowing more time for creative and intellectual pursuits. As writer Venkatesh Rao argues, machines colonized time itself, creating a surplus that could be reinvested in new ideas - a positive feedback cycle that defines modern civilization.
Now we're witnessing the Third Industrial Revolution - the combination of digital manufacturing and personal manufacturing, essentially the industrialization of the Maker Movement. Like the Web, which was first colonized by tech companies before being democratized for regular people, digital manufacturing is extending production capabilities to everyday entrepreneurs. Though we often discuss the "weightless economy" of digital goods, transforming physical manufacturing has tremendous leverage in the global economy.
Manchester epitomizes this industrial evolution. Once the center of global textile trade, "Cottonopolis" thrived due to its space for factories, proximity to rivers for power, access to the Atlantic, and rail connections. But Manchester's success contained the seeds of its decline - local firms exported their machinery worldwide, where it was copied and enhanced. By the 1950s, more factories stood empty than full. Today, after decades of decline, Manchester is reinventing itself. The Northern Quarter houses web companies in gutted warehouses, while the Manchester Fab Lab represents manufacturing's future in the city that birthed its past.
Capítulo 4
Democratizing Design: Everyone's a Creator
The shift from making things by hand to digital design represents a generational transformation. In the 1970s, industrial arts classes taught students to use tools like band saws and drill presses. Home hobbyists built Heathkit electronics and tinkered with cars. But starting in the 1980s, this hands-on culture began fading as manufacturing jobs declined, school budgets were cut, and computer classes replaced shop classes. Electronics became sealed units with "no user serviceable parts inside," and cars evolved from mechanical systems you could fix to computerized machines you couldn't.
Now, thirty years later, desktop fabrication tools are bringing back the opportunity to make things, but with a crucial difference - the emphasis is on design rather than just manufacturing skill. Two decades after desktop publishing revolutionized printing, the word "desktop" is transforming industrial machinery. We now have desktop 3-D printing, computer-controlled routing and milling, laser cutting, computerized embroidery, and even 3-D scanning.
What's important about "desktop" is the democratization it brings - just as the personal computer transformed from an expensive novelty to an essential tool with countless unexpected uses, desktop fabrication will follow the same path. Today's 3-D printers are where Jobs's Macintosh and LaserWriter were twenty-five years ago - expensive and hard to use, but with enormous potential. Just as desktop publishing confronted amateurs with unfamiliar terms like kerning and text flow, desktop fabrication introduces bewildering concepts like meshes, G-code, and feedrates. Don't worry - these will become second nature, just as computing terminology did.
Capítulo 5
The Long Tail of Things: Mass Customization
Mass production works for the masses, but what works for you? The Internet democratized publishing and communications, creating a massive increase in participation and a Long Tail of digital goods. Now the same is happening with manufacturing - the Long Tail of things.
My daughters' experience with 3D-printed dollhouse furniture illustrates this shift perfectly: instead of settling for expensive, limited commercial options, we downloaded free designs from Thingiverse and printed exactly what we wanted. While today's home 3D printers are crude (like 1980s dot-matrix printers), they'll soon print in multiple materials and colors with professional quality.
This democratization puts tools in the hands of those who know best how to use them. The Internet already removed two major distribution bottlenecks by allowing retailers to list more products (Amazon) and helping people find niche items (search). Now we're tackling the production bottleneck itself, as regular people gain the ability to make physical goods just as they've been creating digital content.
The Long Tail of things already surrounds us in hyperspecialized suppliers - from replacement parts for vintage cars to artisanal jewelry on Etsy. What's different about these niche physical goods? They command higher prices from discriminating audiences, celebrate uniqueness over uniformity, and often come from passionate consumers-turned-entrepreneurs who prioritize community over profit maximization. Digital manufacturing eliminates the cost penalty for complexity and short production runs - when computers run production machines, making each product different costs no more than making them all identical.
This hyperspecialization isn't necessarily profit-maximizing but rather meaning-maximizing. Happiness economics research shows that once basic needs are met, people willingly trade potential earnings for more satisfying work. Erik Hurst's research suggests half of entrepreneurs start businesses as much for happiness as money. Consumers also value products they've had a hand in creating - researchers call this "the IKEA Effect." Experiments show people bid 67% more for furniture they assembled themselves versus identical pre-built units.
What's different now is that DIY culture has met Web culture at the intersection of digital design. Physical products - from Apple devices to cars - now start life as digital information. Hardware has become mostly software, with products essentially intellectual property embodied in commodity materials. As products become information, they can be treated as information: collaboratively created, globally shared, remixed, and reimagined.
Capítulo 6
Digital Fabrication: The Tools of Transformation
When Captain Picard orders "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." on the Enterprise, the ship's replicator assembles the necessary atoms instantly. While today's 3D printers are far from Star Trek's molecular assembly, they offer a glimpse of that future - we can imagine something, draw it on a computer, and a machine makes it real.
3D printers build objects layer by layer, with applications ranging from small-scale (printing cells for organs) to massive (printing concrete buildings). Unlike traditional manufacturing, digital fabrication inverts economics by making variety, complexity and flexibility essentially free - it costs no more to make every product different than identical ones. However, 3D printing lacks economies of scale - making one thousand items costs the same per unit as making just one. This makes it ideal for small batches but inefficient for mass production.
Companies like MakerBot have democratized the technology with affordable printers that use melted plastic to create objects, bringing industrial capabilities to hobbyists. The open-source philosophy behind MakerBot represents not just a tool but a cultural transformation and belief system as powerful as democracy or capitalism for its adherents.
3D printers are essentially three-axis CNC machines with motors controlling movement along x, y, and z axes - similar to inkjet printers but with an added dimension. They use various techniques: fused deposition modeling (FDM) squeezes melted plastic through tiny holes, stereolithography (SLA) uses lasers to harden liquid resin, and selective laser sintering (SLS) hardens powdered materials. As "additive" technology, 3D printers build objects layer by layer from bottom up, unlike "subtractive" CNC routers that cut away material.
While 3D printers capture our imagination, laser cutters are the true workhorses of the Maker Movement - they're the "gateway drug" to digital fabrication. These CNC machines use computer-controlled lasers to cut or etch materials ranging from plywood to thin metal. Their popularity stems from simplicity: unlike 3D printing, you only need to create 2D drawings, making them accessible to beginners. Despite working in two dimensions, laser cutters can create 3D objects by cutting components that fit together with tabs and slots, like wooden dinosaur skeleton kits.
The digital fabrication revolution isn't just about turning bits into atoms - we can also turn atoms into bits through "reality capture." This process scans physical objects to create digital 3D models that can be modified and reproduced. While professional 3D scanners use lasers and cameras, affordable alternatives are emerging. Autodesk's free 123D Catch service transforms regular photographs into 3D models, even on iPads. As resolution improves, we're approaching the ability to "photocopy reality" - first duplicating form, and eventually function too.
Capítulo 7
Open Hardware: Collaborative Creation
Open hardware creates a remarkable business model where customers help develop products they'll eventually purchase - you give away the bits (designs) and sell the atoms (physical products). This collaborative approach emerged from personal experience when Chris Anderson's disappointing weekend of failed tech projects with his children led to an innovative breakthrough. After attempting to build Lego Mindstorms robots and crashing an RC plane, Anderson realized the sensors in the Lego kit could potentially create an airplane autopilot. This sparked the creation of DIYDrones.com as a social network rather than a blog, enabling a community where everyone could contribute equally.
Anderson's hobbyist project transformed into a business starting at his dining room table. Using a community-created design, he sourced components globally before eventually contracting with proper assembly firms. Within three years, his company 3D Robotics expanded from a kitchen table operation to two 12,000-square-foot factories in San Diego and Tijuana. Revenue grew from $250,000 in year one to $3 million by year three, with projections of $5 million for their fourth year. Two-thirds of their sales came from outside the US, demonstrating the power of competing globally from day one.
Open hardware follows the "give away the bits, sell the atoms" model-freely sharing digital designs while selling physical products. By 2011, over 300 commercial open-hardware products generated more than $50 million in annual revenue. This approach aligns with the original intent of patent law: encouraging inventors to share knowledge publicly. Open innovation offers advantages beyond traditional IP protection: faster development, built-in market testing, and a community of evangelists. Companies benefit from essentially free R&D as skilled professionals contribute during their free time, motivated by being part of something meaningful rather than financial compensation.
Building an effective open-source community requires thoughtful management and incentives. Anderson recommends structuring rewards beyond simple payment, as many contributors decline royalties that would increase product costs and limit adoption. Successful maker communities like MakerBot, Sparkfun, and Adafruit thrive by producing rich, engaging content-daily blog posts, videos, and photo streams that document their progress.
How can open-innovation companies protect themselves from competition? While trademark protection offers some defense, fighting infringement internationally is expensive. The real defensible advantage comes from building ecosystems-networks of companies and innovators creating products that work with yours. Open-source projects like Android and WordPress succeed because openness builds constituencies that create network effects harder to copy than code.
Capítulo 8
Reinventing Manufacturing: From Garage to Factory
The Maker Movement's ultimate impact will be measured by its ability to influence major manufacturing industries. Local Motors in Chandler, Arizona represents this potential - an open-source car company operating from a converted RV warehouse. Founded in 2007 by Jay Rogers and Jeff Jones, Local Motors reimagined car manufacturing through web-based community design. Their designs are crowdsourced, components are mostly off-the-shelf, and they hold no patents-preferring to share ideas openly for collective improvement.
Unlike traditional kit-car businesses that copy famous designs, Local Motors creates only original designs through community competitions. Their first car, a Baja racer called the Rally Fighter, was inspired by the P-51 Mustang fighter plane. The overall design winner was Sangho Kim, an Art Center College student who earned $20,000, but more than 160 people contributed to various components. Their 20,000-member community includes both professionals and amateurs, tapping what Rogers calls the "Long Tail of talent."
The real revolution will come as cars become more like computers on wheels - particularly electric vehicles where software expertise matters more than mechanical engineering. While GM's Volt took six years and $6.5 billion to develop, the Rally Fighter required just eighteen months and $3 million. As products become more software-driven, community development can reverse planned obsolescence, allowing products to improve after purchase through updates.
Tesla Motors represents another aspect of this manufacturing revolution. Their factory uses standard KUKA robots with composite arms that can be reprogrammed in minutes and typically perform dozens of different tasks by switching between various tool heads. Unlike traditional custom automation, these general-purpose robots bring flexibility to manufacturing. By using digital fabrication tools like laser cutters and CNC machines, Tesla can produce much of what used to be outsourced.
This manufacturing model allows America and other high-cost countries to compete globally. With automation reducing the labor component of manufacturing, traditional labor cost advantages become less relevant. The future of manufacturing is infinitely flexible, adaptable, and democratized at any scale.
Capítulo 9
The Open Organization: New Ways of Working
Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems co-founder, revealed a flaw in traditional organizational theory with what became known as "Joy's Law": "No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else." This echoed Friedrich Hayek's earlier observation that knowledge is unevenly distributed and centralized organizations can't effectively tap distributed knowledge.
Even the best companies like Apple are limited by geography, legal work status, hiring preferences, and other factors that exclude brilliant potential contributors. Communities, being more egalitarian and having fewer legal obligations than companies, can take more chances with participants. With the Internet, labor markets are changing - you can find and tap the best people regardless of location, or they can find you.
After launching DIY Drones, Chris Anderson connected with Jordi Munoz, who had posted about using Arduino to fly a toy helicopter with a Nintendo controller. Despite English not being his first language, Munoz impressed the community with his fearless experimentation and technical abilities. Only later did Anderson learn that Munoz was a 19-year-old Mexican native with no college education who had just moved to Riverside while waiting for his green card. None of that mattered - his demonstrated abilities were what counted. Today, Munoz is CEO of 3D Robotics Inc., a multimillion-dollar company with a factory in San Diego.
Joy's Law has inverted Coase's Law - working within traditional companies now often imposes higher transaction costs than collaborating online. Corporate bureaucracy and approval processes can slow innovation, while communities form organically around shared interests with minimal process. Yet physical manufacturing still requires a company structure to handle production, inventory, insurance, and customer support. The new manufacturing model needs both traditional manufacturing expertise and web company skills in building communities.
Despite gloomy headlines about American manufacturing's decline, U.S. factory output has actually doubled since 1975 and remains near all-time highs. Major manufacturers like GE, Boeing, and even U.S. automakers remain global leaders. This suggests manufacturing geography isn't just about cheap labor. As Apple demonstrates, proximity to consumers helps design better products.
While manufacturing output has doubled over four decades, employment fell 30% due to automation. The real job creators are small businesses that grow into larger ones - but unlike the First Industrial Revolution, these don't need to become industrial giants. Companies built on the Maker model often maintain lean staffing while outsourcing production to partners. Their strength comes from open communities, web-centric operations, and born-global approaches serving international niches from day one.
Capítulo 10
Financing the Maker Revolution
The Maker Movement is redefining how products move from conception to market, blurring traditional boundaries between creation and commerce. Alex Andon's Jellyfish Art exemplifies this transformation. After discovering that regular fish tanks are deadly for jellyfish, he quit his biotech job to create specialized tanks with modified pumps and water-flow systems. When he envisioned a purpose-built tank with laminar-flow filtration and color-changing LED lighting, he turned to Kickstarter, setting a modest $3,000 target that was reached within 24 hours. By the end of the 30-day campaign, he had raised over $130,000 from 330 pre-orders, providing him with seed capital, guaranteed orders, and validation - all without debt or giving up equity.
Kickstarter solves three critical problems for entrepreneurs. First, it moves revenues forward in time, providing funding when it's most needed without loans or investors. Second, it transforms customers into an engaged community who follow progress updates and become evangelists for the product. Third, it offers invaluable market research - if a project doesn't meet its funding target, it likely would have failed in the marketplace anyway.
In April 2012, a small Palo Alto startup team launched the Pebble smartwatch on Kickstarter just one day before Sony announced its own Smartwatch. The Pebble was simply better - featuring a sunlight-readable e-paper display rather than Sony's dim OLED screen, iPhone compatibility (not just Android), more apps, and a lower $115 price point. The Pebble team set a modest $100,000 target but reached it in just two hours. By day's end, they'd hit $1 million; after three weeks, they'd raised over $10 million and pre-sold 85,000 watches.
Crowdfunding's next evolution is moving from pre-orders to actual company investment. In April 2012, following advocacy from entrepreneurs and even celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg, President Obama signed the JOBS Act, allowing regulated crowdfunding sites to help companies raise up to $1 million from regular people without the complex accounting and disclosure requirements of traditional stock offerings.
While Kickstarter leaves funded creators to navigate manufacturing alone, Quirky combines crowdsourcing with professional product development. Founded by Ben Kauffman in 2009, Quirky puts two community-invented products into production weekly - typically clever household accessories under $50 that solve everyday problems. Their process is remarkably democratic: anyone can submit an idea for $10; the community votes on favorites; designs are submitted by both inventors and Quirky professionals; further voting determines names, features and branding; and finally Quirky's engineers make it manufacturable.
Capítulo 11
The Future of Making: From Desktop to Factory
The digital transformation of manufacturing has created new possibilities for makers of all sizes to access global production. MFG.com survived the dot-com crash by embracing simplicity - just a straightforward platform for uploading files and getting quotes. Today, it's the world's largest custom manufacturing marketplace with 200,000+ members in fifty countries, brokering $3-4 billion monthly.
Jack Ma's Alibaba represents another dimension of manufacturing's digital revolution. Today, Alibaba has 70 million users and 10 million "storefronts," functioning as the eBay of manufacturing where anyone can order custom-made products in any quantity. This democratization of manufacturing access means individuals can now engage factories directly - ordering prototypes and scaling to production runs in ways previously available only to large corporations.
Beyond Alibaba's marketplace model lies the fascinating world of "shanzhai" manufacturing - a decentralized ecosystem of Chinese factories originally known for producing knockoffs but now driving manufacturing innovation. These nimble operations ship over 250 million mobile phones annually, often in small batches under 10,000 units. What makes shanzhai remarkable is how their open innovation resembles open source software development. Without centralized control, these small manufacturers share information freely, creating a responsive micro-manufacturing ecosystem.
The ultimate Maker dream is a Universal Fabricator - a Star Trek-like Replicator that can produce almost anything on command. Though still fictional, MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld believes we're only 20-30 years away from this reality. The path to universal fabrication won't come from simply improving current machines that "smoosh stuff around." Instead, we need intelligent materials that "help" with their own assembly - like Lego blocks that correct mistakes and provide their own coordinate system.
Nature already works this way. Crystals self-assemble into complex structures like snowflakes and diamonds. Our bodies are made of proteins assembled under DNA's instruction. Researchers can now synthesize DNA strands that form geometric shapes through "DNA origami," creating structures like boxes with doors that respond to chemical triggers. Though still microscopic, these experiments suggest programmable matter at a macro scale isn't impossible.
What economic future does the Maker Movement predict? Will Western countries regain manufacturing might through thousands of smaller, nimble firms rather than industrial giants? The barriers to entry are falling dramatically, with automation reducing labor costs to a small fraction of production expenses. The advantage now lies not in cheap labor but in innovation culture and supply chain efficiency. The future manufacturing economy will follow the Web model-distributed, entrepreneurial, and diverse. We'll see more innovation from more people in more places, focusing on niche markets. For every Foxconn with half a million employees, thousands of smaller companies will emerge, collectively reshaping the industrial landscape into the Long Tail of things.
