Faster Future: Possibilities now and beyond: 3d printing

Showing posts with label 3d printing. Show all posts

Thursday, April 06, 2017

Why robots are essential to kick-start our next age of innovation

Yamaha's Robot rider could one day end the chore
of riding fast motorbikes... er, ok it's not all good.

There is an argument - and a well made one at that - that our era is not an age of great technological change - but actually one that is quite stagnant.

Robert J Gordon made the case in his book 'The Rise and Fall of American Growth'. He points out that the Great Inventions that caused real change arrived between 1870 and 1970.

The internal combustion engine changed the way we travel (removing the growing threat of horse manure - which experts predicted would reach 9 feet deep on London's roads by 1950 if allowed to go unchecked). It changed the way we travel much more than any subsequent improvement in performance or styling.

Urban sanitation similarly had a greater impact on our health than medical inventions of more recent years. The invention of the telegraph versus the written message carried by ship, horse and hand which preceded it is a far bigger shift than fax to email or phone to mobile.

The impact was that we got to live (US childhood mortality tumbled from 1/3 in 1860 to 1/200 today), we got to live longer, and we got more time to do with as we pleased (being liberated from household tasks such as washing clothes and preparing meals which had taken 58 hours in 1900 - and 18 in 1970).

Jesse Frederick argues in his assessment of Gordon's ideas that our blindness to the comparative stagnation of the modern era can at least be partially attributed to the fact that the technology of the past mainly created time, whereas today’s technology fills it.

Gordon, published in 2016 - sees this stagnation as permanent. Mostly because the big wins for technology have already been won. But part of the problem is for all our technology we feel as though we have less time. And time is essential for the ideas that make real change.

Enter Robots. the AI revolution and the robotics it is driving are about to answer Jesse's criticism of today's inventions. They are certainly not a technology that fills time, they will create at least 18 hours for us (finishing up the last bits of housework our inventors have failed to resolve so far - ironing, dusting, food prep and cooking, physically moving the devices about etc). The internet of things completes the picture in shopping.

Ok, an 18 hour saving isn't as great as the 40 hour leap that got us here - but this one will come in 5-10 years. The last took 70.

And we haven't even considered the saving in time AI will bring to our working (and commuting) lives. Finally, the time technology promised to free for us will actually arrive.

And yet, even for the slam-dunk win our robot friends will provide, there's an even bigger opportunity for genuine life change: How we organise is changing.

How we organise is society and society is how we live.

As I have long argued; the web enables adhoc self-forming groups to get things done. That's a fundamentally different form of organisation than preferred by 1870-1970. That era was also an era of centralisation and mass production. The next 10 years is about decentralisation and personalisation; whether it be through micro factories in every home (3D printing), the move away from public transport (driverless cars, drones) medical technologies that self diagnose and repair (nanobots) or how we learn, get justice, make contracts and exchange value (blockchain).

We will have the opportunity to live entirely unique, separated lives. But all the evidence of the world since the web is that we will use it to become closer and better connected - without the need for central organisation.

A future without centralised or top-down direction is being enabled through the technologies of this decade and the next.

Very soon we will have the collective time to carefully consider what our future should look like and imagining how we can reach it - kick-starting the next age of innovation.

And that, when we pause to reflect on the shift from 2010 to 2030, will, I believe, provide us with a case to say we really do live in a time of not just fast, but radical change.

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Open Business - Principle 3: The Networked Organisation

I've just published the third of our 10 Principles of Open Business over at 90:10 Group.

The third Principle is the one that defines the structure of an Open Business. It is that it should be a Networked Organisation.
Networked Organisation (or as McKinsey is labelling them, Networked Enterprises) will be familiar territory to anyone who has read this blog for a number of years. They go by the alternative name of Platform Organisations. An excerpt:

“The organisation functions as a platform connecting internal networks to external ones for a common Purpose.” (see Principle 1: Purpose).
This speaks to and supports our primary definition of an Open Business: One which uses its resources to bring people together to achieve a shared Purpose – designed from the outset to scale through participation making partners of customers.

You can read the full blogpost here.

I've been thinking and writing about the shift from traditional to networked (or platform) organisations since I began this blog. As more tech gets deployed, the clearer the requirement to connect inside and out reveals itself.
And, as I previously discussed, with the arrival of 3D printing the veil lifts on the true role of the organisation - suggesting a platform (or networked) approach has been the natural state to which organisations were always going to return when our view became clear:

When we talk about means of production, we often think about the machinery to produce. But that does not mean the device.
In a mass production world the connection between the machinery and the process is clearer. Traditionally a newspaper owner needed to own a printing press. They also needed to employ a team or writers, photographers, editors etc to produce the content. Which was the means of production? The printing press or the producers of the content? The two were so tightly connected it didn't matter.

On the web the owner of the means of production of content is the person who creates the content. In reality this was always so. In the past the owner of the means or production of content had no access to the printing press. Now they have (or at least to its equivalent in the form of the web - where of course everyone is a publisher).

The same is true of factories; where the production line is the equivalent of the printing press. In a world in which everyone has access to their own production line ( a home 3D printer) the real means of production is revealed as those coming up with the ideas, process and required designs.

What is clear is that 3D printing throws into sharp relief the need for organisations to think of themselves far less as the makers of, and far more the supporters of the makers of, 'their' products.

From 'The Challenge of 3D Printing to the role of the organisation'

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Video: Webciety CeBIT keynote: How the web changes the organisation of business

For those of you who weren't at Webciety at CeBIT, Hannover, Germany on Thursday March 8, or weren't able to catch the live webcast of my keynote when it was first broadcast, a recording is now available.

The video lasts almost an hour which includes introduction, my keynote and a panel discussion of the themes it outlines. In summary it explores how the future isn't digital, it is self-organised, how and why the web powers disruption based on this and explores the role of the organisation in a world in which we can organise for ourselves more cheaply and effectively than ever before. It also recognises the challenge of 3D printing in this context - how this reveals where the means of production have always resided and what this tells us about the key tasks that must be taken on by the org of the future.

I've expanded a few more thoughts, specifically in relation to 'Loose Ties and Sufficient Organisation', which are detailed in my blogpost of Saturday March 10, 2012.

I have also updated the slides on slideshare to those I finally presented. I hope you find them useful.

How the web changes the organisation of business and the business of organisation

View more presentations from david cushman.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

The challenge of 3D printing to the role of the organisation

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.
Love this article by Simon Bradshaw, Adrian Bowyer° and Patrick Haufe on the trends among, and impact of, 3D printers. I recommend you go read the lot.
In summary the story goes that 3D printing (ie the ability to copy and fabricate products in the home very simply and cheaply) is likely to have the same impact and reach as the home pc before too long.
So for those of you who thought the disruption delivered by the power of the network was limited to movie making, music production and paid-for content, it's time to take a deep breath and imagine this near future:

"All this may be heading towards a world in which people do not buy consumer goods any more but instead download them from the web and print them themselves. They will be able to customise them at will and may avoid some of the environmental and monetary cost currently entrained by the (often global) physical transport of manufactured goods; indeed, work is in train to make RepRap [a community-owned and very low cost 3D printer] run on home-recycled plastic which would further reduce such costs. In particular, the ability of a 3D printer to, in principle, print a copy of itself, and for both machines to print further copies and so on, suggests that the cost of 3D printing may rapidly fall to the point where it becomes a widely-available technology.

Oh, but what of economies of scale? That's the howl heard railing against anyone touting the accurate serving of microniches (in which users get to shape products to their actual specific fitness landscape, compared against the potentially wasteful ill-fit of the lowest-common-denominators of mass production).
The future is a more widely distributed, less centrally organised place...

"...having many people making few items in the home, instead of few people making many items in factories, is against the idea of economies of scale. But economies of scale are not universal: in the past people took clothes to central laundries to have them washed; now people use their own washing machines. Today electricity is generated in 2 GW power stations tomorrow it may be generated by individual photovoltaics on everyone’s roofs. And industrial printing presses offer far greater economies of scale than the home inkjet printers mentioned in the first paragraph that are – for many types of printing – replacing them."

My caveat is this: our preference, as very social beings, is to always work with others. We are not silos and we will not produce, customise or replicate in silos. The web is not primarily for taking from (ie searching for a product to download and print out). It is for connecting us.
Less for taking from, more for making with (others).

Through it we connect with people aiming to solve the same problem as us in real-time. That's where it delivers real value. Through those relationships our preferences are also shaped.
When we find each other we need effective ways of surfacing our best ways forward - and support in reducing the cost of delivering those solutions/fixes/next steps.

Even a world in which we all have a home factory requires a platform approach. The very process of making together delivers better results for those with shared purpose (none of us is as clever as all of us, after all...)

Platform Organisations can help bring us together and help us discover the more successful collective solution. The expertise organisations contribute will be another value-add. And their ability to bring us together to source raw materials at a collective price, another.

3D printing becomes one of the ways in which the outcome is delivered. It's the new delivery truck. But the web itself - and the relationships it enables - retains its role as means of production (via co-creation - making with).

When we talk about means of production, we often think about the machinery to produce. But that does not mean the device.
In a mass production world the connection between the machinery and the process is clearer. Traditionally a newspaper owner needed to own a printing press. They also needed to employ a team or writers, photographers, editors etc to produce the content. Which was the means of production? The printing press or the producers of the content? The two were so tightly connected it didn't matter.

On the web the owner of the means of production of content is the person who creates the content. In reality this was always so. In the past the owner of the means or production of content had no access to the printing press. Now they have (or at least to its equivalent in the form of the web - where of course everyone is a publisher).

The same is true of factories; where the production line is the equivalent of the printing press. In a world in which everyone has access to their own production line ( a home 3D printer) the real means of production is revealed as those coming up with the ideas, process and required designs.

What is clear is that 3D printing throws into sharp relief the need for organisations to think of themselves far less as the makers of, and far more the supporters of the makers of, 'their' products.

Which is exactly how a platform organisation should be thinking...

One final thought inspired by the article (The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing) - the authors conclude: 'Within the UK at least, personal use of 3D printing technology does not infringe the majority of IP rights.'
Which makes me wonder what planet those politicians who forced through the Digital Economy Act are living on...