Makerspaces and Contributions to Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is essential to the growth and dynamism of countries and regions, forcing policy makers to search for levers to generate new firms within their municipalities. Without public attention, the maker movement, which refers to the democratization of access to and information on using tools, has risen from a fringe hobby to a prominent lifestyle with important implications for public concern. Modernly, tools have been available only to those working within firms and industry or those willing to pay large costs for their procurement. The maker movement presents multiple avenues to increase access to these tools, with the potential for impacts on the quantity and nature of entrepreneurship. My paper explores makerspaces and how they theoretically contribute to business generation and sustainment. As defined in the paper, the maker movement will influence entrepreneurship through three principle channels. The maker movement attracts more individuals into product design, and thus may launch more "accidental entrepreneurs" if they find that their user solutions have a market. Secondly, the maker movement generates dense but diverse networks, creating new ideas and innovative thinking. Lastly, the maker movement lowers the costs for prototyping, making early sales and acquiring outside funding more realistic.

Cultura maker e empreendedorismo - Os espaços maker como promotores de uma cultura local empreendedora

“…Espaços desta natureza são, em última instância, sistemas experimentais e justamente por isso um sistema experimental não traz as respostas e perguntas convencionais [11] . A variedade de finalidades dos espaços maker é fluida, como menciona Holm [12] cada espaço maker é único e a maneira como ele contribui com a comunidade local é determinada pelos fundadores e membros. Alguns makerspaces têm um foco mais empreendedor e oferecem serviços similares a incubadoras ou espaços coworking com o benefício adicional dos equipamentos internos.…”

“…Pensando na inter-relação entre a cultura maker e empreendedorismo, Holm [12] salienta que ela pode se dar, principalmente, por três aspectos. O primeiro é que a cultura maker incentiva o design de produtos e assim pode "lançar" mais "empreendedores acidentais".…”

Impact Assessment of Additive Manufacturing on Sustainable Business Models in Industry 4.0 Context

“…This exchange also maximizes the use value of intellectual property, which is an essential element of an open business plan. In the work, the model created was inspired by multisided platforms and open source [87], where the first step is to analyze the whole project before a sequence of questions based on the Canvas model [88]. The tool consists of nine inter-related building blocks around four critical components: "value proposition, value creation, value capture and value delivery" [89][90][91].…”

Co-Working Spaces - A new agenda for place based economic development policies

“…Recent studies have discussed the role of these spaces in local economic development processes (Van Holm, 2017), and their relationship with entrepreneurs (Gertner & Mack, 2017). Research has also confirmed the impact of CWSs on education and employment creation (van Holm, 2015;Wang & Loo, 2017;Wolf-Powers et al, 2017), as well as the importance of entrepreneurial co-location within cities more generally (Andersson & Larsson, 2016;Witt, 2004). However, there is still a need in the current policy framework to specifically address the implications of these developments on economic and spatial planning.…”