Business Models for Fab Labs
Few months ago, Platoniq commissioned me a report about business models for Open Hardware, DIY Craft and Fab Labs, for their crowdfunding project Goteo. It is now available here in English, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License; it will be soon available in Spanish from Platoniq’s YouCoop website. Just note that the two versions may slightly differ (it happens when you work on two different versions of the same document); the idea is to transform it in a collaborative book in the future, here on openp2pdesign.org. After the part about Open Hardware, here’s now the second part, about business models for Fab Labs. Fab Labs and other places for designing and making collaboratively As we have seen in the previous post, Open Hardware and similar Open projects can grow as communities inside specific places like hackerspaces. View Fab Labs on Earth in a larger map Funding a Fab Lab: how much does it cost? Running a Fab Lab: Business Models
What is a FabLab?
This is a post I’ve been waiting to write for a long time, either because I’ve been very busy or because I’ve wanted to write something meaningful and with a direct experience. After working on the development of the Aalto FabLab, after doing the one week Fab Boot Camp (January 2012) in FabLab Barcelona and the 5 months FabAcademy in FabLab Amsterdam (and after years of previous research on the topic), after visiting other FabLabs and meeting people in the community, I now have enough experience and material to write this post. All the pictures come from the Aalto FabLab’s Flickr account, where automatically pictures are uploaded, showing thus all the activities and the projects developed in the lab. What is a FabLab, then? 01. Though it may be also a space for developing prototypes or building final working products, the main goal for a FabLab is to be a space for experimenting at the intersection of bits and atoms, information and matter. 02. 03. 04. 05. 06. 07. 08. 09. 10.
Massimo Menichinelli on the Ten Characteristics of FabLabs
Excerpted from Massimo Menichinelli: 01. A space about bits and atoms “Though it may be also a space for developing prototypes or building final working products, the main goal for a FabLab is to be a space for experimenting at the intersection of bits and atoms, information and matter. That’s why there is a huge adoption of tools and components for working with electronics, for example. 02. Being a FabLab means being part of a global network of local nodes, and this aspect is very important, much more developed than in hackerspaces, makerspaces and TechShops. This is also why nodes should share the same set of tools and processes (though local experimentations are welcome): in order to enable any project to be replicated in any node of the network. 03. Every FabLab is part of two communities: the local community, and the global community of all the FabLab in the global network. 04. As stated before, FabLabs should share the same tools, in order to enable collaboration among the nodes.
10 things to do when starting a FabLab
After the post on the business models for FabLabs, and the post about the complex nature of a FabLab, in this post I would like to use my experience on building the Aalto FabLab in Helsinki and the experience of working and visiting other labs for explaining 10 simple suggestions for who’s thinking about to build a FabLab. As said before, there is no single book or how-to guide for starting a FabLab, for two reasons: on one side the knowledge required for starting and running a FabLab is always under development and evolution, on the other side the unique conditions of the local context require each time to develop a custom model. Check other suggestions about starting a FabLab here. 01. Always start from understanding and defining the local conditions and how they will influence your project. 02. 03. 04. When you start drafting the business plan, be very careful with all the costs in running a FabLab, don’t just calculate the costs of the machines and the tools! 05. 06. 07. 08. 09.
Fab Lab Business Models
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