Chapter 3: The Maker City as Open Ecosystem
The Maker City is a dynamic, open ecosystem of resources that spur economic and cultural growth through collaboration and innovation. An ecosystem is no more and no less than a loose coalition of people and organizations that share both an interest in something and a similar set of values.
Almost every city we talked to when developing this Playbook had an ecosystem they could point to although some didn’t use that word.
The Maker ecosystems we’ve seen start out in a self-organized fashion when like-minded individuals with a shared sense of purpose connect people, ideas and projects together in a city. Seldom is any one person or organization “in charge.” Leaders emerge who can greatly influence and accelerate the growth of the ecosystem but they might be anyone; a specific job title or function is less important than passion, enthusiasm, and energy.
All cities have the potential to build a rich ecosystem around Making for their economic benefit. Start by understanding the fundamental nature of your city and build from there.
Understanding Ecosystems as Center and Edge Phenomena
Throughout this project we worked with Deloitte, a consulting firm widely recognized for its ability to recognize the trends that shape our future. Under the leadership of John Hagel, John Seeley Brown, and Duleesha Kulasooriya, Deloitte’s Center for the Edge studies innovation and how emergent forms of change diffuse through institutions and society.
In 2013, Deloitte’s Center for the Edge worked with Maker Media to publish the first ever study of the impact of the Maker movement on the US economy.
Why is an Ecosystem Important?
A key tenet that runs throughout the work done at Deloitte’s Center for the Edge is that activity on the edge of an ecosystem is a precursor of change at its center.
Think of it this way. When activity starts at the edge of an ecosystem, it marks the beginning of change. As the ecosystem grows in the number of connections and the strength of the ties between players, the change starts to make its way into the center. In other words, a strong Maker ecosystem can affect change at a number of levels within cities that, from the outside at least, look impervious to change.
In this chapter, we’ll discuss how a Maker ecosystem gets started, how it manifests itself in Makerspaces and Maker Faires, and how these activities at the edge have the kind of ripple effect that over time, changes the fundamental nature of the Maker City at its very core. Most of the cities we spoke to considered the formal learning community to be at the core of the Maker ecosystem. It’s not good or bad to be at the core versus the edge; these designations are more about how long the institution has been in place within the city and therefore about the institution’s openness to innovation and rapid change.
Often we find that the Maker ecosystem in a city starts at the edge, reaching out and into the learning community, and then growing up and out in an organic way to business and industry, eventually engaging the core where local and regional government agencies sit.
There are two ways to maximize change, according to Deloitte. You can let the ecosystem self organize or you can set up an organization or person to orchestrate interactions. What doesn’t seem to work during times of rapid change and innovation are highly centralized structures, what Deloitte calls “hub-and-spoke” structures. These tend to limit interactions between participants in a way that is not beneficial and should be avoided.
Activation is Important
Deloitte and others who study ecosystems understand that it is not enough to declare that you have an ecosystem; you must also encourage people and organizations to exchange and interact. This process is often called “activation.”
Makers tend to activate around the resources they have access to, such as a physical space like a Makerspace; parks or public squares where their prototypes get displayed; tools, like 3D printers or sewing machines; events, festivals, and Maker Faires; and funding opportunities.
Activation also gets kindled by local community members, with the availability of space playing an important role, as we’ll see in the case studies that follow.
The strongest Maker Cities organize around nodes and networks that allow anyone to become a part of and contribute to the new ecosystem.
Understanding the Maker Ecosystem
Maker Cities vary in terms of the strength of their fundamental ecosystems around Making. Those with the strongest ecosystems activate nodes at the edge as well as in the center.
At the edge, the Maker City Ecosystem is made up of:
- Makerspaces, fablabs and fabrication shops.
- Makers as individuals and groups.
- Activist communities. Community organizers with a specific interest in creating economic opportunity for young people are often a great starting place.
- Artist communities and industrial art centers.
- Faith-based communities. A good starting point is with a Youth Minister, Assistant Rabbi, Arts Coordinator, or Community-Outreach Specialist.
- Manufacturers, Suppliers.
- Tech communities. Look for Meetups happening in your community around hardware, hobbies, crafts, and/or manufacturing. Search “Making,” “robotics,” and “drones” as keywords. Also seek out startup companies and entrepreneurs.
At the center the Maker City Ecosystem is made up of:
- Local and regional government. Engage with your Mayor, the Chief Innovation Officer (if your city has one), and/or the Office of Economic Development.
- Corporations. Work with Community Development officers, the Chief Innovation Officer, the Director of Innovation, the General Counsel’s office in charge of IP, or anyone who has spoken on behalf of a company for Open Innovation, as well as the philanthropic arm of larger companies such as Salesforce.org.
- Real Estate Developers. Look for real estate developers in your city who work with mission-oriented nonprofits. Also find developers who have an interest in the adaptive reuse of older buildings and/or who are committed to helping young people advance in your community.
- Philanthropic Foundations.
- Research Universities.
- Hospitals.
- Nonprofits.
In between the center and the edge, the Maker City ecosystem is made up of:
- K-12 Schools, Community Colleges, Universities. Target science teachers, principals, department heads especially in STEM/STEAM, businesses, and designers who have shown an interest in Making.
- Libraries & Museums. Librarians are often huge champions for the Maker movement. Also check out your local science or art museum.
- Recreation/Community Centers. Maker programs are appearing in after-school programs, at rec centers, and inside parks.
- Community-based organizations. YMCAs, JCCs, Boys & Girls Clubs are obvious places to start.
- Design and Engineering Firms.
It is particularly important to engage people from the tech industry, associated creative industries, and manufacturing industries, as well as selective representatives from the scientific and medical communities.
Artisanal and craft businesses are also important to include. Additionally, cultural organizations in art and music, organized as collectives or shared studios, should be included.
Makerspaces Play a Pivotal Role in Forming the Ecosystem around Making
Makerspaces can reside in schools, libraries, or museums, or can be larger and more freestanding. What’s important is that every city have a dedicated space for Making where the relevant equipment is available, not just for young people but for others in your city interested in using the tools of Making to create businesses and economic opportunities.
Creating a Makerspace need not be expensive. You’ll read examples here of Makerspaces that got started on as little as $5K. Today, that is not the norm, largely because Makers have grown in both their levels of sophistication and expectations.
MIT created FabLab as a lightweight and inexpensive lab that could be built inside schools and junior colleges. Today, there are 1,000 FabLabs in 78 countries, most costing $25K-$65K in capital equipment to start up and about $15K-40K in consumables per year.
Artisan Asylum (2014) provides a list of starter equipment for a Makerspace and estimated the startup costs at $40K-$70K.
Space is also important for Makers. We see some of the bigger and more elaborate freestanding Makerspaces being created to house not just the equipment of Making but also co-working space, space to host meetups, and other convenings. Operational costs can exceed $1M a year for this kind of Makerspace, many of which double as innovation centers in their communities.
An innovation center is a large building or complex of buildings that can serve as a hub for entrepreneurial activity in your city. Innovation centers can be modeled along the lines of the Cambridge Innovation Center, the largest such space in the country, which provides co-working space for startups. Others are more membership driven, designed to make the tools of Making available for a low monthly fee and offering classes that build Maker skills, much like a gym. Ford and TechShop just collaborated on a Makerspace that is 33,000 feet large, membership driven, and designed to serve as an innovation center for the City of Detroit. We discuss this more in Chapter 5 when we discuss Workforce Development.
Put Your City on the Map
The Maker Map is a crowd-sourced directory of the physical locations of Maker resources. You can use it to discover the resources that are already known in your area, such as Makerspaces, manufacturing resources, and retail businesses.
The Maker Map is a great example of the self-organizing principle. It is most comprehensive in cities that have literally “put themselves on the map.”
Creating a map of the Maker resources in your community can be a powerful way to connect people together.
If the Maker Map doesn’t adequately reflect the resources in your community, then organize a meeting of people to gather that information collectively and put it into the Map. The Maker Map shows how technology can play an important role in making resources more visible and, as a result, more accessible.
3D Hubs is a distributed 3D printing service that allows its customers to use a local resource to get a 3D-printed object. Its map identifies individuals or services that participate in its network and provides a view into the local Maker community. New York leads the nation in the number of 3D hubs with nearly 500 3D hubs in their network; Los Angeles is next with 381 hubs. Below is a map of Cleveland and northern Ohio, showing their 3d printing hubs.
Another example of an excellent Maker Map comes from Shenzhen, China. Created by Seeed Studio for Maker tourists, The Shenzhen Map for Makers lists factories, Makerspaces, leisure activities, and electronics markets for shopping.
Survey the Maker Ecosystem
After a map, the second step is to survey Makers in your city so as to better understand what they are doing and the kind of support Makers need. Portland is a great example.
Portland’s Artisanal Economy
Portland, Oregon takes pride in the artisans, crafters, and Makers who work there and who are supported by the many people who choose to buy locally-made products. It’s a place that draws talents from other parts of the country for its tech and creative industries, yet it also attracts the independent-minded who want to work for themselves and are looking to create meaning and purpose in what they do.
Portland’s ADX, founded in 2011 by Kelley Roy, has become a hub for the local Maker community. “ADX is a collaborative Makerspace where individuals and organizations make and learn. By sharing tools, knowledge, space, and experience, we are doing things better by working together,” explains the website. Roy created not only a space but also developed the Portland Made Collective to represent the people and their products from Portland. Roy, in her book Portland Made, says that she “hoped to create a place for creative people from all industries to work … and turn those ideas into businesses.” There are almost 400 members of the Portland Made Collective, an impressive array of artisanal, small batch producers.
In 2014, Portland State University Professor Charles Heyring surveyed 126 members of the Portland Made Collective (PMC) and published a report stating that the members “employ an estimated 1,024 persons and generate revenues of $258M.” In this survey, members reported “very positive revenue growth with an average of 61 percent cumulative for the last three years.” Members also preferred to identify themselves as Makers or artisans rather than entrepreneurs or business people.
Respondents were asked to identify where their sales came from. The report found a fairly even split between local and non-local sales.
“Given the size of most firms, their products, and their assumed preferences for everything local, we expected a larger percentage of reported sales to be local. While the share of Portland Metro sales was substantial (46%), an even larger share (54%) of sales were outside the Portland Metro area. It is noteworthy that 30 percent of U.S. sales were beyond the Northwest region and that international sales accounted for eight percent of total sales.”
A conclusion of the report is that cities should support the growth of smaller enterprises, many of which are still proving themselves:
“As expected, most enterprises are quite young, with 62 percent in operation five years or less and 83 percent ten years or less. It is noteworthy that the three enterprises that have been in operation for thirty years or more produced 90 percent of the revenues and 70 percent of the jobs. The lesson is not to ignore the smaller enterprises but to nourish them. Two of these three large companies were started in small studios by founders with a passion for their work and the ability to turn that passion into something substantial.”
In 2014, the Portland Made Collective (PMC) had 126 members. By 2015, the number of members had increased 2.7X to 342 members. The 2015 survey of the PMC membership estimates revenues of $316M. Across all categories, PMC found revenue growth to be a very healthy 37 percent from 2014 to 2015.
The survey also found that clustering Maker enterprises is a critical for Makers and Maker-enablers as well as those who seek their products. “In interviews, Makers identified proximate access to the Maker ecosystem as important for inspiration, problem solving, resource exchange, marketing opportunities, and a way to benefit from the collectively created Portland Made identity.”
Fielding a local survey of Makers is an important step in learning more about who they are, what they do, and how a Maker City can best support them. On the last two pages of the 2014 Portland Made Report you’ll find a sample survey you can work with and adapt it for your own purposes.
Engage Educators
Remake Learning Network, Pittsburgh, PA
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is a Maker City with a strong Maker ecosystem. This wasn’t always so. The ecosystem that developed there came from the realization that the education system was failing its children. Gregg Behr was early in his tenure as Executive Director of the Grable Foundation when he interviewed stakeholders in education:
“The thing that I heard them repeat that dumbstruck me was this, that ‘I’m not connecting to the kids the way that I used to.’ On one hand, that was totally normal because I’m sure generations of adults have said that about kids today.
“But what was so striking about it was that they literally meant kids from 2005 to 2006, or kids from 2005 to 2007. So for us, that presented the question: is there something seismic that’s happening among youth and youth culture, in a way that should prompt us to think differently about how we’re supporting schools, museums, libraries, and then the construction, the exhibit and the design of camps, as well as the professional development to support all of these types of institutions that could or should be relevant to kids’ lives?
“Simultaneous to that happening, I had occasion to have a simple coffee meeting with a woman who had her own gaming company in town but was also an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center. And when I met with her she turned my eyes open to a whole group, a cadre of roboticists, gamers, and technologists of all sorts who also were thinking differently about their products and services, and how they were supporting kids and education and learning.
“… I thought, if early adopters in the education field, and this whole other crowd of people are thinking along similar lines, could we bring them together? So, I literally organized a pancake breakfast, there were probably about 10 people there, who themselves were from different backgrounds. There was a roboticist there. There was a teacher there.
“You had about a dozen people, and it was just one of those moments. It turned out to be this enriching conversation, and people said this is the new narrative about learning. And I could imagine two or three other people who I heard bring this conversation. So, that’s when, at the time it was called, we ultimately called it The Kids+Creativity Network, and over the past few years, it’s been re-named to The Remake Learning Network.”
Today, the Remake Learning Network has broad community support and is “highly coordinated communities of people and organizations allowing for synergies, swapping ideas, rubbing shoulders, and working together toward a shared vision.”
Sunanna Chand, Remake Learning’s Impact Strategist explained: “Since its establishment, the network has grown to over 250 organizations, including early learning centers and schools, museums and libraries, after school programs and community nonprofits, colleges and universities, ed-tech startups and major employers, and philanthropies and civic leaders. Together they have created more than 100 Makerspaces throughout the country.”
The Role of Corporations in Building out the Maker Ecosystem
Louisville, Kentucky and GE Firstbuild
Corporations can play a leading role as facilitators of a Maker City ecosystem, connecting not only with Makers but also with local government and universities.
Across the United States, the rate of innovation in product development life cycles has impacted how local economies can adapt to market dynamics and demands. The products we once bought and kept for a lifetime are now being disrupted by information technologies. Just as consumers expect continual upgrades on our mobile phones, the same is true for durable goods like appliances and cars. This is proving to be a significant challenge for cities whose economies and cultures are built on traditional industries. Cities are now tasked with reinventing these industries to stay competitive in both attracting talent and large companies.
Looking to leverage entrepreneurial networks to help them become more innovative and competitive, GE decided to establish FirstBuild, a Makerspace micro factory and cocreation community for household appliances. GE’s Appliance Park is located in Louisville, Kentucky but GE wasn’t sure there was enough talent in the city to make the project successful.
They were originally looking at cities in the Sun Belt or on the East Coast. City officials wanted FirstBuild to locate in Louisville and organized a meetup at the local Makerspace, LVL1, which had established a thriving community of Makers.
Much to GE’s surprise, when they presented their ideas to local Makers, the interest was high and the questions indicated that Makers already had ideas about what they’d like to do to create smart appliances.
When GE opened FirstBuild, they organized community hackathons and noted that the GE employees of Appliance Park were participating on their own time in significant numbers. Louisville’s commitment to innovation, its history in manufacturing, and the growing Maker community that was already enmeshed with the GE fabric were what sealed the deal.
Ted Smith, the Chief Innovation Officer in Louisville, initiated the meetup between GE and local Makers:
This is about getting the cycle time down for your product innovation
“[Companies in] the durable goods category are going to have their lunch handed to them by companies that can move more quickly. [To] introduce new kinds of features and functions, very quickly, the only way you can do that is if you change the way you think about fabrication.
“[At the same time], the reason that these companies have to leave to go to these other markets [like San Francisco or Seattle] is because that’s where there’s a real concentration of expertise in that industry. That’s why they go there. We should just take the lesson, like who should we be attracting here and what are those new products? To me that’s the soup that we’re trying to cook here. Let’s take advantage of the bench strength that’s in the industries that we have and let’s guide future entrepreneur inventors down the path.”
For Smith, that means leveraging both the resources of corporations and the innovativeness of entrepreneurs.
“From an economic development perspective, Making and more modern approaches to manufacturing have a proven and immensely synergistic fit with local industry. As a result, Louisville is now looking to figure out where else this synergy can be applied for their other signature industries. Smith went on to say, ”I think there’s a lot of room in this movement for this kind of empowerment, but I do think it requires some kind of organizing principle, like FirstBuild is an organizing principle for most scale manufacturing.”
Venkat Venkatakrishnan, Director of Research & Development for GE Appliances, explained:
One of the advantages of having an open business model is we don’t have to go through a lot of agreements and bureaucracy to get something done.
“A number of the universities from this area are engaging with us–the design schools and the engineering schools–and the reason is that this is the best way to produce the best engineers and Makers and artists. We leverage them often.
“For instance, if I want to build 15 ovens tomorrow, we pay engineering students on a part-time basis. They are looking for part-time jobs and we actually get them to come and make the parts and assemble the ovens and learn what good design is in doing so. It’s not just an assembly process; it’s a big learning process. Now, we get a lot of assistance from the university, and the university looks at it as the best experience that they can give their students in terms of education. And it’s not only engineers. We even have artists coming and working in our place and working with us. What we are trying to prove is if you set up an open co-creation facility like this where you not only design products but also build products and sell products, we can do all three… We are now convinced that the future of product development will be similar to the way we are doing things.”
Forging an Ecosystem to Reflect a City’s Legacy and Story
Macon, Georgia’s SparkMacon
Macon, Georgia has a population of 91,000 people and is located 80 miles northwest of Atlanta. Nadia Osman is Director of SparkMacon, a storefront Makerspace, and organizer of the Make-End Maker festival. Prior to that, Nadia served as Director of Revitalization and Business Initiatives for the College Hill Alliance, a small nonprofit that facilitates the economic development of the area between Mercer University and downtown Macon.
“We wanted Macon to be a place with a new narrative that’s attracting and retaining talent and that completely supports Makers. In Macon, they are identifying stakeholders and bringing them together. They are doing a creative census to identify creative industries and the people that work in them as well as their skill sets.”
Nadia emphasized the importance of connecting all of the Makers that are involved in the academic, business, government, and nonprofit worlds.
“We have the infrastructure, but they’re not talking to one another,” she said. The goal is for Macon to become a hub for talent, education, and industry.”
Macon has a rich history it can draw upon. It is known for music making, being the birthplace of Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers. “That leads all the way to the manufacturing base that we have as well as the Makers of today who are based in the tech and creative sides,” said Nadia. “It’s been around a long time. We just haven’t had a word for it. Also, we haven’t yet successfully capitalized on it.
“We have done the research into entrepreneurs and how they’re being supported in the area. We wanted to find out why we’re honestly not attracting and retaining talent. What it came down to again was not that we didn’t have the infrastructure. We have all of that but we had not found a way to actually bring it together. We didn’t have a way to reinforce the value of taking risks on new ventures, that you can do things that are nontraditional. Our issue right now is fundamentally changing the culture of what it means to operate, to live, to work, and to play in Macon.
Makers Self-identify as “Makers” not as Entrepreneurs
“When we first explored supporting and understanding the entrepreneurs in our area, that word in and of itself–’entrepreneur’–came across as somewhat pretentious. Existing entrepreneurs did not identify with it. The minute that we put out a call for Makers, even though people did not understand the word, [most] actually gravitated towards it… [they] understood that the Maker is the first word, and it’s the first movement that has tied together such different industries. Maker brings together our engineers, our artists, our manufacturers, and our tinkerers. Entrepreneur doesn’t do that. No other word does that.
“What has made a lot of this new work in community and economic development possible is that, as most cities have found, if we don’t change things, we’re going to die. We need to do it now.”
Manufacturing Sector as a Leader
Eric Gertler: New York City Economic Development Corporation
The manufacturing industry in New York City, which had been in decline for 50 years, began to stabilize in 2011. Now there is growth in manufacturing. The industrial sector represents about half a million jobs in New York City. Manufacturing is about 15% of that so it’s about 75,000 jobs. New York City’s Economic Development Corporation (NYEDC) has been focusing on advanced manufacturing and connecting the Maker community in the city. Eric Gertler was formerly Executive Vice President for the NYEDC and also oversaw the Center; he has since moved on to a job in the private sector at Ulysses Ventures. Under his tenure, NYEDC developed a wide range of initiatives, perhaps more than any city in the country.
“We realized that the innovative advanced-manufacturing sector was bubbling up. It was quite dispersed around the city and we devoted much of our early efforts to simply trying to connect some of the Makers with some of the facilities and at least provide some cohesion to that movement. But that is just part of the reason why we’ve seen a lot of this emerging sector develop in New York City. New York City is also ideally suited for this type of sector because we have a great blend of creative folks, artistic folks, a strong and growing technology sector, and a legacy manufacturing industry. All of this combined with the ongoing and vibrant business that goes on in New York helps create a very robust advanced manufacturing sector in New York City.
“We launched the Next Top Maker competition, which is simply one of the many activities that the city undertakes to help support the Maker movement. This competition is really a challenge to innovators, to Makers, to designers, and to creators to originate and come up with innovative products and ideas that have commercial potential.
“But, given the geographical constraints of and zoning within New York City, we are still trying to figure out the real estate for this sector and its physical requirements. What’s interesting, however, is that when you look throughout New York City, the advent of new manufacturing has really been a five borough phenomenon. There are companies like littleBits that was created in Manhattan, MakerBot in Brooklyn, or Shapeways in Queens. We are starting to think through Manufacture New York, as well as the involvement of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Brooklyn Army Terminal. Incidentally, these two buildings were built by the federal government and then bought by the City for one dollar about 40 years ago.
“We are starting to rethink how we use this space. There are millions of square feet that could be modified for legacy industries that need new types of innovations. We’re not there yet. But we have certainly made great strides. What’s going on at the Brooklyn Navy Yard is really interesting. There’s some great companies that are doing different types of manufacturing as well as advanced manufacturing in the Brooklyn Army Terminal but I still think we are in the early parts of that movement.
“As a City, we have spent a lot of time focusing on what I would characterize as public-private partnerships. But it’s even more than that. It’s the combination of business with academia in the City that will have a profound impact on our future. For example, the Applied Science Initiative is a partnership with Cornell Tech to bring and increase the number of applied science students and engineers in New York City. The reason why such partnerships are important is that this new Maker movement has come from all directions. It started from the community, bottom up. It came from business. It came from the academic centers. And, finally, it has developed because the City has been a convener of all these groups, bringing together and connecting the universities with the businesses, with financing, and enabling those connections to happen faster.
“One of the many things we do at the New York City Economic Development Corporation is welcome a lot of groups from all around the City, and, quite frankly, from all around the world. We are excited to share what’s going on. But, for now, we are continuing to think through the connections and hone what we are doing things to spur innovation and activity. I truly believe that, with government, little things can lead to big actions. And, this is certainly a sector where you can easily imagine the little things we are doing now leading to another vibrant and growing new sector in New York City.”
ManufactureNY and the Reinvention of New York’s Fashion District
Bob Bland is founder and CEO of ManufactureNY, a partnership between the Economic Development Corporation of New York City, private real estate developers, and the fashion industry. Its goal is not just to preserve the fashion industry in NY but also to help it thrive in a new world where fashion called wearables uses electronics and becomes interactive. In its 30,000 square foot space, ManufactureNY is offering long-term leases at favorable terms to retain and renew many of the small businesses that make up the fashion industry in New York.
“I’ve always said that America’s been defiant. Our actual reputation around the globe is based on innovation and entrepreneurship, and that’s what we need to be doing here now to create a new type of ecosystem not just for creatives, but all the different portions of the supply chain in my community. Every single person who works in New York City has a family. And if they’re working in New York City, that’s benefitting another business. It amplifies that benefit to do as much as you can here instead of taking money elsewhere.
“The businesses we work with need support over the long term, and it starts with general operations. Overhead is where people are getting killed right now, especially in New York City. Their overhead expenses include their rent, utilities, payroll, all of that. And so any change in their circumstances can be incredibly volatile, especially for contract manufacturers. They’re typically working with 10–15 percent margins because that’s the price that the customer expects. And there’s no way to get out of that model without ballooning your margins and losing all of your customers.
“…[I]f we’re not getting our heads together and all coming together in one space to create solutions, then what’s going to happen? So I feel that with ManufactureNY, this model of economic development gives people who would otherwise never meet each other a chance to work together and create the fashion supply chain of the future.
“By controlling your entire supply chain and having accountability for everything from the concept to the distribution, you can play with all the levers. And one lever is certainly that direct sales is now roaring back with a vengeance, especially for startup companies in the design space. That can allow you to increase your margins by an enormous amount and then pay a little bit more for the clothing while still maintaining a fiscally healthy business.
“We need to create meaningful solutions and not just rely on the past. So when people come to us and say, ‘Oh well, that’s impossible,’ it’s like believing is seeing. We’re going to create that here in that way where… with clear vision, with fearless execution, and with the right people around to share this vision, we can absolutely make a new economy that supports everyone, not just the people at the top.
“We will bring wearable technologists and traditional fashion designers and contract manufacturers together because we see a lot of promise in these collaborations. And even here in our temporary space, this space which was 150,000+ square feet that we’re currently deploying, we’ve already seen so much of that collaboration resulting in successful ecosystems for each line. So I think it’ll be a game changer.”
Connecting the Local Supply Chain
Manufacturing in Los Angeles
Krisztina “Z” Holly is Founder and Chief Instigator of MAKE IT IN LA, an organization run out of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office as part of its Entrepreneur in Residence program.
Today, Krisztina works in Downtown LA at the La Kretz Innovation Campus, a space that houses the LA Cleantech Incubator, The Prototyping Center, LADWP laboratories, and a training center. She also records her podcast, The Art of Manufacturing, at Maker City LA, a workspace collective for creative businesses, Makers, and entrepreneurs, housed on the 11th floor of The Reef in downtown Los Angeles in what used to be the LA Mart, a huge space for wholesale showrooms.
Holly explains how Los Angeles is connecting its vast manufacturing resources:
“Los Angeles is the largest manufacturing center in the country. Manufacturing should be as influential and dynamic as tech and Hollywood. These two industries are so big and important that they’re spectator sports now, for better or for worse. Manufacturing is not that. It’s underground and people don’t think it’s sexy. Manufacturing hasn’t really gotten the respect that it deserves, especially considering we literally have four times as many jobs in manufacturing as we do in film and television. You don’t hear about that, you hear about Hollywood.
“We did a year-long study of local businesses last year and learned some surprising things. If you look at the Dunn and Bradstreet data, there are about 30,000 self-identified manufacturing companies in LA County. That’s a lot. They span industries from aerospace and electronics to food and fashion. Most of them are very small and some of them are mom and pop shops. Others are highly capitalized high tech enterprises, like SpaceX and Hyperloop One.
“The folks that we’ve engaged with are incredibly diverse, and while this is not 100% representative of the industry, our respondents are nearly half women- or minority-owned. Pretty cool: 47 percent of the businesses were either women-owned or minority-owned. I think that there’s a real opportunity to also recast the image of entrepreneurship, and of manufacturing, through the people that are rolling up their sleeves and taking risks on their next big thing.
“We found that 58 percent of the businesses that we surveyed have excess production capacity, and they’re interested in learning more about contract manufacturing. Meanwhile, most companies in L.A. County are interested in sourcing more locally but they don’t really know how to connect to the right capabilities at the right price.
“There’s a lot of recent activity and startups trying to create tech platforms for connecting like BrightHub, ThinkFab, Connectory, Makers Row, and more. The feedback that we heard from manufacturers was that there’s skepticism around a pure technology solution. They’re open to using technology-enabled approaches but they really want to build relationships face-to-face. They value recommendations from their peers and their colleagues.
“And in certain industries, like apparel, there’s a lot of secrecy around who your suppliers are because, for this old guard, that’s their secret sauce. There’s value in having those networks. Companies are less open to sharing their networks. Now, there is a subset of these companies that are really interested in collaborating. So the key is not quantity; at this point, we need to focus on engagement. We’re identifying the innovative suppliers and customers in this ecosystem that want to work together to grow the pie.
“We’ve started developing a coalition of organizations whose mission is to support the entrepreneurial ecosystem and inspire Makers to turn their ideas into products in LA. As a group we’re committing to developing educational programming to serve more than 1,000 entrepreneurs in the coming 18 months.”
Gigabit Broadband as an Enabler
“The Gig” Comes to Chattanooga, Tennessee
An interesting example of city investing in network infrastructure is Chattanooga’s city-provided ultra high-speed fiber-optic internet service it calls “The Gig.”
Established five years before Google prototyped fiber in Kansas City, the network transfers data at one gigabit per second: 50 times faster than the connection for homes across the rest of the U.S. It’s among the fastest internet in the world. Surprisingly, the network was not built by a large tech or telecommunications player like Google or Comcast. The publicly owned electricity company, EPB, built it as a way to monitor and communicate with advanced digital equipment being installed on the grid and respond more quickly to outages. While the fiber itself is impressive, the doors it is opening for the city are much more exciting.
Mike Bradshaw is Founder and CEO of Company Lab (Co.Lab), a nonprofit entrepreneur center in Chattanooga. He sees the potential in gigabit broadband to support advanced manufacturing by allowing very complex objects to be designed, sourced, and built in concert with suppliers, manufacturers, and experts in advanced materials who are geographically dispersed. Zero latency becomes a requirement if the dispersed team of players involved in advanced manufacturing are to collaborate together effectively.
“Units to be assembled at some later time down the stream, what would happen if these machines were hooked up, in a fluid network where geography and time weren’t really an issue, meaning that you’d have photonic networks with virtually zero latency between the machines, allowing them to take a complex build and adjudicate the manufacturing process in this set of geographically distributed machines?”
This network dissolves barriers to information transfer, empowering local entrepreneurs and Makers to collaborate around high value domestic manufacturing without limitations that come with geographical distribution.
Sheldon Grizzle, founder of the Company Lab, speaking to The New York Times, had this to say about “The Gig,” the taxpayer-owned, fiber-optic network:
It created a catalytic moment here… [it] allowed us to attract capital and talent into this community that never would have been here otherwise.”
Its impact on Chattanooga is only the beginning. The intention is to advance the technology even further to promote collaboration as an engine of innovation and economic development where entrepreneurs, innovators, and Makers can connect in real time with cities across the nation, putting Chattanooga and every city that joins them on the innovation map.
Implications for Cities
The most notable examples of organizing structures are those that leverage the formality and resources of partnerships to augment the openness of knowledge sharing and the development of talent through networks.
- Encourage the Maker City ecosystem to grow from the edge to the center. Organizations that are explicitly “about” Making are a great starting place as your city builds out its ecosystem. But the most robust ecosystems we encountered were open; they allowed anyone with both a strong interest in Making and shared values to participate. Faith-based organizations, trade unions, and members of the scientific and medical communities may seem like unlikely members at first, but their contributions can accelerate change at the center of the Maker City ecosystem in your city.
- Map what you have. Encourage entities in your city to place themselves on the map using open-directory tools. We talked about two such tools in this chapter: The Maker Map and 3D Hubs.
- Survey people and organizations who are involved in Making in your community, to learn what they need and where they fit into the ecosystem. A sample survey is available on the last two pages of the Portland Made report to use as a starting point. The methodology is pretty straight forward. Portland Made worked with a research team through a university, which may be a no-cost or low-cost way for your city to get this kind of survey completed.
- Analyze your ecosystem and look for gaps. One cost-effective way to do this is to hire a college student to work as an intern one summer and map the resources that exist using the spider diagram introduced above which distinguishes between resources on the edge of your ecosystem and resources at the center. Once your city has identified a major gap in its ecosystem, it knows where to focus its economic development resources.
- Start organically. The most robust ecosystems start out organically in a self organized fashion; only later, as the ecosystem matures, does it make sense to ask an organization to step in and coordinate activity. To organize Maker activity in your city, often you need look no further than the people who run the local Makerspace. But there are other organizations that can help. Many cities are finding they benefit from setting up a group that encourages pride in locally made goods and/or providing explicit support for urban manufacturing.
- Consider municipal broadband. Chattanooga and other cities are finding that the introduction of gigabit broadband as a municipal utility, much like electricity, water, or waste disposal, can have a transformative effect, particularly on advanced manufacturing in a Maker City.
- Look at real estate as an asset. Brooklyn has a strong Maker ecosystem in no small part because it has industrial space where Makers can thrive at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and in a facility for the fashion industry at ManufactureNY.
- Study the economic impact of Making in your city. We believe that Making is having a transformative effect on our cities, creating jobs and economic opportunity. But we cannot always prove it. A cost-effective way to get started here may be to identify an economist at your local college or university with a research interest in the Maker movement.
- Hire or appoint someone to serve as a dedicated advisor for Maker activity in your city. San Francisco experimented with this and quickly discovered that what they needed was less of a Maker liaison and more of a champion for Making that led directly to urban manufacturing. They provided us with a sample job description for a “Make to Manufacture Fellowship” that cities can leverage. (Job description courtesy of the Mayor’s Office of Innovation (MOCI) for the City and County of San Francisco, 2015).
