Distributed Manufacturing – Systems Innovation

Until just a couple of centuries ago, most communities around the world had to produce most of what they consumed. The industrial revolution introduced economies of scale and mass production systems to serve the newly forming national markets. Globalization then led to an increased global concentration of production as advances in IT-enabled the outsourcing of manufacturing to emerging countries as factories became mega-factories providing global supply chains. As a consequence manufacturing, until recently, was a daunting space with high barriers to entry and hefty initial capital investments; while products had to navigate multiple intermediaries before reaching the consumer.

Today, however, huge shifts in technology and the broader economic context have eroded barriers that once impeded the flow of information, resources, and products. Barriers are starting to fall everywhere; lower barriers to accessing the machinery needed, to learning, lower barriers to commercialization and financing. Traditional manufacturing companies are now facing a nexus of challenges, under pressure to optimize increasingly complex supply chains that lack visibility, new environmental considerations, changing customer demands as unmet needs around customization, and co-creation are causing niche markets to proliferate.

At the same time, a whole new world of the Internet of Things is opening up new possibilities. The technological advances of IoT are enabling modularity and connectivity to transform products from inert objects into “smart” devices. The nature of these products is changing, with many goods transcending their roles as material possessions that people own to become services for accessing. These objects are becoming linked into larger and larger information service systems where they have to interoperate and coordinate to deliver services.