Factoids

Maker City: A practical guide to reinventing our cities

A list of data factoids about the impact of the Maker Movement and/or urban manufacturing on our economy. Note that there is more work to be done here to better understand and quantify the economic impact of Making on cities.

Deloitte Report

Deloitte wrote a definitive report on the Maker Movement and it’s impact. (Source: Deloitte Report, 2013)

Collaborative production will define the future of work

Over 70 Kickstarter-funded Makers, who collectively received $23M in pledges from over 138,000 individuals, present at the 2014 Bay Area Maker Faire
Shapeways announces over 13,500 online storefronts selling 3D designs in 2013
Etsy reports $1.35B in total merchandise sales in 2013 from over a million active shops
Rethink Robotics launches safe, capable, intelligent, and affordable industrial robot – Baxter – for $25,000
Foxconn deploys 20,000 robots as part of its plan to have over a million robots in its factories over the next few years

The Maker ecosystem will disrupt today’s large enterprise

Manufacture New York announce 2014 opening of 160,000 sqft clothing design and production center in Brooklyn, New York with potential to house 70 resident designers and large related community
GE partners with Local Motors to launch FirstBuild, an open platform to source collaborative ideas online from a community of engineers, scientists, fabricators, designers and enthusiasts to prototype, iterate and refine existing GE products, as well as build and commercialize various new designs
e-NABLE’s $50, community led, open sourced, 3D printed hand matches up against $42,000 prosthetic
Facebook Buys Oculus VR, a crowd-funded virtual reality gaming company, for $2B

Empowered demand drives supply, and Manufacturing and Retail follow the customer

Martha Stewart curates over 1,100 small batch, artisanal items on her eBay site, “American Made”
Consumer participation increases on niche, Maker-made e-commerce sites like Etsy, Grommet, and Shoplocket
Major shoe brands from Nike to Converse and Jimmy Choo allow consumers to create customized shoes
Over 70 craft beer brewing establishments apply for permits in San Diego in 2014

In Education, practice trumps theory

TechShop Chandler, located in the Arizona State University (ASU) Chandler Innovation Center, provides space for ASU students to connect and collaborate with Chandler-area makers and entrepreneur
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) evaluates students’ maker portfolios as part of the application process14
A recent survey of 143 librarians noted that 41% of respondents (from 30 US states and 7 countries) currently provide makerspaces in the library
10 prominent universities commit to supporting the growth of and involvement in the Maker Movement in an open letter to president Obama

With shared production and marketplaces in communities, agency trumps apathy

100 Maker Faire’s were hosted in 2013 across the globe allowing over 530,000 people to experience a Maker Faire
Hackerspace.org identifies over a thousand active hackerspaces world wide
Jobs in the manufacturing sector double in San Francisco – currently more than 4,000 manufacturing jobs in 500 companies; up from 2,500 jobs in 250 companies in 2011
BALLE, a business alliance supporting local business growth, boasts 30,000 innovators, 80 local business networks and over 450,000 jobs

Ten Statistics that reveal the size and scope of the Maker Movement

Source: Extension.org, 2015

There have been over 400 Maker Faires organized around the world since 2012.
A record 215,000 people attended the two flagship Maker Faires in the Bay Area and New York in 2014, with 44% of attendees first timers at the Bay Area event, and 61% in New York.
The White House held its inaugural Maker Faire in 2014. “Today’s D.I.Y. is tomorrow’s ‘Made in America.’”
President Barack Obama proclaimed June 12 through June 18, 2015, as National Week of Making. Calling upon all Americans to observe the week with programs, ceremonies, and activities that encourage a new generation of makers and manufacturers to share their talents and hone their skills.
There are 1975 hackerspaces across around the world.
$529M was pledged to Kickstarter projects in 2014. That’s more than $1,000 a minute.
The world’s crowdfunding sites reached close to $5B in transactions last year. By 2025, the crowdfunding investment market is projected to reach $93B.
The 3D printing market is projected to be worth $8B by 2020.
World demand for 3D printing is projected to increase more than 20% per year to $5B in 2017.
Distributors estimate that over 1M Atmel powered Arduinos have been sold since 2005.

Economic Impact of Maker Movement

Source: Grommet Report, 2014)

57% of U.S. adults are Makers = 135M Americans (Martha Stewart, USA Today Oct, 2013)
The Maker Movement contributes to the 28M small businesses in the U.S. and these businesses create 2 out of every 3 new jobs in our country (Martha Stewart, USA Today Oct, 2013)
$29B are pumped into the economy each year from the Maker Movement (Martha Stewart, USA Today Oct, 2013)
The 3D printing market is projected to be worth $8B by the year 2020 (MarketsandMarkets, Nov 2013)
The World is expected to crowdfund $5.1B in 2013 (Forbes, April 2013)
48% of large manufacturers plan to return production to U.S. from offshore (The Wall Street Journal, June 2013)
There are 200+ hackerspaces across the U.S. (New York Times, May 2013)

Growth of Tech Shop Worldwide

January, 2015

CEO of Tech Shop, Mark Hatch, says in the Bay Area, TechShop catalyzed $10B in shareholder value, $2B in annual sales, $200M in annual salaries, created by members who have come in and picked up the skills that they needed to start a business or to start an educational institution or to pursue their dreams.

October, 2015

TechShop says it saw its revenue grow by 345 percent over the past three years, reaching $12M last year, with new member signups growing by 30 percent.
TechShop, has opened its first location in Asia—specifically, in Tokyo, Japan. And it’s partnered with Japanese tech giant Fujitsu to do it.

August, 2015

TechShop, a membership-based, do-it-yourself workshop and fabrication studio, has been recognized by Inc. Magazine on its 34th annual Inc. 5000, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies for the third year in a row. In addition, TechShop was also recognized as a top fastest growing company in the San Jose Metro Area, ranking number 15 on the sub-list.

March 2016

TechShop St. Louis is one of 10 planned or open workshop locations across the country since the first location opened in Menlo Park in 2006. Since then, the Makerspace, founded by Jim Newton and Ridge McGhee, has expanded not only nationally and internationally, but also with institutional and corporate collaborations.
GE has partnered with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Center for Innovation to offer 3,000 free one-year memberships, professional instruction, hands-on training, and access to TechShop’s workspaces, machines, tools, and community to veterans across the country. An additional 1,000 TechShops slots were made available for veterans through GE’s Get Skills to Work coalition. This initiative helps veterans and employers translate military skills to in-demand, advanced manufacturing positions, offers skills training for former service members, and empowers employers to recruit, onboard and mentor veterans.
Lowe’s has collaborated with its neighboring TechShop Austin-Round Rock, a 17,000-square-foot facility, to offer the community an easier way to access materials, space and classes. A passageway is open from one building to the other and that specific Lowe’s stocks items and materials that other Lowe’s in the country do not, so TechShop members have easy access to everything they need.
Arizona State University was the first university to partner with TechShop when they opened a workshop and fabrication studio in downtown Chandler last fall. Students in Arizona State’s College of Technology & Innovation, or any other discipline have access to classes and equipment. Public memberships are also available, offering a chance for both populations to mingle and share knowledge, ideas and skills.
Intel is working with TechShop in the launch of America’s Greatest Makers, a reality competition premiering next month on TBS. The show, by executive producer Mark Burnett, allows competitors, both groups and individuals, will bring in their best tech product ideas, and each week they will fine tune their products through weekly challenges at TechShop San Francisco.

Growth in 3D Printer Market

September, 2015

Gartner Says Worldwide Shipments of 3D Printers to Reach More Than 490,000 in 2016; 3D Printer Market Set for Rapid Growth With Worldwide Shipments Forecast to Top 5.6M by 2019
Worldwide shipments of 3D printers will reach 496,475 units in 2016, up 103 percent from the predicted 244,533 units in 2015, according to Gartner, Inc.’s latest forecast. 3D printer shipments are forecast to more than double every year between 2016 and 2019, by which time worldwide shipments are expected to reach more than 5.6M.
Gartner forecasts 3D printer sales will grow at 72.8% CAGR through 2019, from almost $944.3M to more than $14.6B in 2019. The total number of 3D printers purchased per year is forecast to grow from more than 106,000 units in 2014 to more than 5.6M units in 2019, a CAGR of 121.9%.
Industrial uses proliferate. Altimeter Group (2014) reports that GE is exploring ways to build more than 85,000 fuel nozzles for its newest jet engine according to Bloomberg. Rather than source, it plans to create the units with 3D printers.

New Entrepreneurial Growth Agenda

Source: Kaufmann Report 2016

Technology Creation and Destruction

As a share of patents granted, patents with novel technology elements have fallen from 31 percent in the 1800s to 0.5 percent since 1970.
The focus of invention instead appears to be shifting toward the development of new combinations of subclasses not seen before

Economic Trends

Reinforcing this analysis, quantitative modeling described in The Future of Employment, by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne at Oxford University, uses a ranking of occupational characteristics to determine how vulnerable specific jobs are to automation during the next twenty years. Frey and Osborne’s main conclusion is that only the most creative and labor-intensive jobs at the extremes of the job scale are likely to survive the trend to automation.
So twenty-first century firms are ripping out their traditional infrastructure and replacing it with software-defined and “chained infrastructure”—virtualizing not only computing, but also networking—that creates new types of pipelines for continuous service delivery

Importance of Entrepreneurship

…[Y]oung firms systematically create more jobs than they destroy, independent of their size. In particular, young firms represent only around 20 percent of total employment, but they account for almost 50 percent of total job creation in the economy; their share in job destruction is around 25 percent. These patterns also hold at the sector level. Small/young firms account for almost 45 percent of job creation in services, and just more than 30 percent in manufacturing
As the Chairman and CEO of Gallup, Jim Clifton, cautioned: “We are behind in starting new firms per capita, and this is our single most serious economic problem. … This economy is never truly coming back unless we reverse the birth and death trends of American businesses.” (Source: OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation)
In other words, there is a startup deficit. As Marc Andreessen succinctly put it: “There’s too much entrepreneurship: Disruption running wild!” “There’s too little entrepreneurship: Economy stalling out!”. (Source: Tweet, 2015)

From Technology Implications

A combination of population decline and population aging suggests a powerful coincidence of needs: as the human population plateaus in the aggregate, continued improvements will require individuals to exhibit greater levels of creativity across the population, and across a human life, than has ever been the case in the past. Some of that creativity will contribute to aggregate growth through improved productivity and new innovations, while an even greater share will contribute to solving what Keynes referred to as the problem of leisure— what we might today think of as the challenge of living a meaningful, fulfilling life.
Platforms are “frameworks that permit collaborators—users, peers, providers—to undertake a range of activities, often creating de facto standards, and forming entire ecosystems for value creation and capture.” Put differently, will the platform transformation create a community of incipient entrepreneurs or vulnerable workers? (Source: Mattila and Seppälä, Machines in a Cloud – or a Cloud in Machines?: Emerging New Trends of the Digital Platforms in Industry and Society, 2015)