Two Challenges Facing Technology-Based, Small Manufacturing
Bringing manufacturing back to our communities will not happen automatically. Yes, we can be hopeful about re-invigorating local manufacturing in a new-industrial-revolution world based on digital fabrication technologies. Digital fabrication leapfrogs the labor-demanding and capital-intense mass production methods that defined the last industrial revolution. As reviewed in earlier postings, for many areas of manufacturing, digital fabrication represents a paradigm shift in how we produce our stuff — one that for some products has the potential to make local manufacturing and small micro-manufacturing realistically competitive.
We might also find it encouraging, as demonstrated by the surging “maker movement”, that hands-on-work along with hands-on-education, hands-on-discovery, and hands-on-creation is again being appreciated. While it may come to pass that historically large portions of our workforce will not again be directly employed in manufacturing, we seem to be remembering the centrality of local production and value creation to community vitality. The factories of the future will not be the hot and dirty places we recollect from our industrial past. Nor are they likely to employ almost half of us. Yet, they can still be a source of good and sustaining employment for many; and, they can generate important collateral value for our communities.
By way of visualizing a community example, consider how digital manufacturing has succeeded at a small scale in making large stuff: Local Motors is producing motor vehicles from open collaboration design methods in community shops. Local Motors integrates a collaborative design network with digital production methods to create innovative vehicles (from desert roadsters to self-driving vans) in shops distributed around the country — making large stuff locally where it can be assembled, utilized, and appreciated. Local Motors is a step ahead of the incipient activity already being seen in individual digital sheet-metal fabbers and machine shops because of its model for distributed production of designs achieved with the wide collaboration allowed by digital communication technologies.
Still, despite such encouraging exemplars, the re-establishment of production in our communities is not inevitable. The technology does not so much give to small-manufacturing a special advantage as it simply creates a realistic opportunity. In order to give the technology-based, small-manufacturers a boost towards real momentum, it is going to take something in addition to the ability to competitively produce and innovate. The technology needs to be combined with energizing the drive of encouraged individual entrepreneurs.
These are the special people who can envision fulfilling futures in work that is engaging but, because it is unlikely to scale large, does not promise superstar recognition or riches. They are the individuals who will recruit and lead small teams of hands-on but technology-oriented producers potentially making much of the stuff we need. They get-off on fulfilling at a local scale and engaging with their communities. It has been our loss that such local production has been discouraged and disparaged as “life-style” business, rather than being recognized as a starting point for rebuilding our value-creation engine.
Two Challenges
The new small manufacturers face two particular types of challenge. First, of course, small-manufacturing can happen anywhere, not just in the US. China already subsidizes startups, reporting the generation of 12,000 new small businesses a day in 2015. And they are not just about bolstering their large, centralized, labor-intense factories of the last industrial revolution. China and many other countries know it is about seeding the small, energetic, emerging, and technically competitive producers of the new industrial revolution — ready to market locally and globally; ready to participate. Any country can reduce the barriers for establishing small manufacturing by acknowledging and encouraging the small producer.
There is a second and potentially more fundamental challenge to having attractive new forms of engaged manufacturers in our communities and it comes from closer to home. It is competition from the heavily resourced, internet retail and logistics companies — the Amazons, FedEx’s, and UPSs — that are just as enabled by digital fabrication technologies as are the small guys. Like small producers, the interconnected regional warehouses of large operations will be enabled by digital fabrication technologies in ways that will allow them to become more responsive to changing customer wants and desires.
The giants can integrate digital manufacturing into their massive logistics operations. Digital fab is likely to become economically attractive because of the same advantages I’ve already discussed for small producers. They’ll be able to offer highly customized products, made immediately, and delivered closer to where they are made. Amazon and UPS are already experimenting with production and logistics models involving on-site digital fabrication within their warehouses. Yep — they already get-it and have begun development. And, they may already have a head-start sufficient to dominate many of the markets in which small producers might compete.
I don’t want to be too negative about doing digital fab within big biz. Manufacturing in such facilities can have local benefits. There are likely to be a number of such operations that will be distributed around the country. And, they will create some jobs.
But, manufacturing when practiced in massive, highly-robotized facilities with low wages is unlikely to be as compelling as manufacturing being done in local, entrepreneurial shops. The big operations may succeed on their own terms, but do not provide the same community benefits as small manufacturing. That’s simply because most of the collateral value of local manufacturing accrues only when it is embedded and integrated within the community. Only when embedded does the presence of production engage owners, employees, and trainees in such a way to become a source for vitality — to foster creative activity, innovation, technological education, and opportunities for continual learning. Small manufacturing is not always the most efficient way to get something made, but it almost always has a wide range of collateral benefits that we have been slow to recognize and support.
Summary: Support for embedded digital manufacturing in other countries and the competition from warehouse digital fab here in the US are the headwinds against re-establishing manufacturing in our communities. We need to innovate new ways to boost local manufacturing and excite its entrepreneurs if we want want to make small manufacturing happen here.
Suggested Read: Jerry Davis’ target essay on affordable digital equipment for the new manufacturing elicited interesting commentary a couple years ago on the 100kGarages site. In the following discussion are proposals for structuring support for the new industrial revolution as well as exploration of different forms it might take as we go forward.
Ted writes about the future of small-shop manufacturing and new fabrication technologies. Ted founded ShopBotTools (digital fab equipment), Handibot(smart power tools), and with Bill Young, started the open, small-shop, fabrication match-up & resource, 100kGarages.
