manufacturing

This is part of my manuscript for a session with Keen Bull on how additive manufacturing will impact the world, at this years DIF-festival.

What we find is that with some superior technological advancements, and additive manufacturing being one of them, the models and practices sustaining a competitive advantage in a given era starts failing.

This is part of my manuscript for a session with Keen Bull on how additive manufacturing will impact the world, at this years DIF-festival.

We believe three things are happening with organizations at the moment..

First, advantage of scale has given far more of us increased material wealth, access to mass education, longevity of life increased social complexity and so forth.

The mass production system has enabled us to grow as human beings. But as we grow we have also come to demand more from the business organizations we depend upon for consumption and employment (1).

This hasn’t been a part of the organizations toolbox.

Organizations have had a blueprint that was tailored for mass efficiency — but not meaningfulness, identity, belonging and individualization.

These elements, which are now essential to the output and progress of an organization were deemed problematic and irrelevant in the old system.

So there is a conflict at the moment between a new generation of employee needs and what the current organizational tools can offer.

A recent post from Booz & Company’s “Strategy + Business” introduced a new term: “backshoring” – an emerging trend of returning manufacturing from an offshore location to the home country (”The Case For Backshoring“). This is especially important for US business, which has been a very aggressive proponent of offshoring for the past decade. Why is this reversal happening? In short, the conditions that made outsourcing look so attractive have changed utterly:

Does where stuff gets made matter to consumers, and thus to brand identity?

I keep thinking that it does, and that it will play an ever-increasingly important role in purchase decisions. Reality hasn't quite caught up with my forecast.

by: C. Sven Johnson

Here’s a quick note to call attention to something that might be of interest: Another avatar fabbing outfit has set up shop. Most of you are probably already aware of Fabjectory, the service that’s been “3D printing” Second Life avatars and objects for the last year or so. Well now there’s a service available for fabbing World of Warcraft game characters.