Manufacturing without the firm: Challenges for the maker movement in three U.S. cities

Abstract

Participants in the U.S. maker movement generate market-worthy consumer goods from the bare bones of novel ideas and simple production equipment. For cities and policymakers, making thus represents the opportunity to develop new manufacturing industries and employment. For makers to transform themselves into large-volume producers, however, they must negotiate significant financing, production and distribution barriers without recourse to the capabilities of the large manufacturing firm. Drawing on 137 interviews with makers and maker-supporting organizations, we call attention to the challenges of “manufacturing without the firm,” as well as the extent to which the localized institutional ecosystems in which makers are embedded may help them circumvent these challenges. Our findings indicate that the maker movement's generative prospects rest on these firms' ability to negotiate problems of production and markets that have beset clusters of small firms for many decades.

The Maker-Manufacturing Nexus as a Place-Connecting Strategy: Implications for Regions Left Behind

“…While early promotors of the urban-maker movement presumed emergent makers would easily graft onto existing metropolitan manufacturing clusters, recent research suggests otherwise, noting that novice inventors and new design firms face considerable difficulties gaining a foothold within their surrounding urban production networks (Grodach 2017;Doussard et al 2018;Schrock and Wolf-Powers 2019). In some cases, local manufacturing expertise is already tailored to specialized local industries or technologies, thus misaligned with the needs of emerging designers (Vinodrai 2010).…”

“…Recent scholarship in economic geography and allied fields has focused on the potential for maker entrepreneurs to scale operations through sourcing arrangements with existing urban manufacturing firms (Doussard et al 2018), in turn extending economic opportunity throughout manufacturing-strong cities (Grodach, O'Connor, and Gibson 2017;Wolf-Powers et al 2017;Vinodrai 2018;Eisenburger et al 2019). Yet, the focus on how the maker movement revives or concentrates manufacturing traditions within urban limits overlooks its larger geographic potential.…”

In the making: Open Creative Labs as an emerging topic in economic geography?

“…From an entrepreneurial perspective, makers are regarded as artisans, tinkerers, and "digital-era inventors" (Doussard, Schrock, Wolf-Powers, Eisenburger, & Marotta, 2018). Thus, makers are manufacturers who benefit from Open Creative Labs as technology, production-side, and service providers.…”

“…He places coworking, but also makerspaces, within local networks of makers and coworkers who may benefit from events organized by the labs and open spaces such as cafés within the lab that are accessible to wider society and that create "improbable" encounters for sharing information, ideas, and knowledge (Capdevila, 2013b, p. 9). Doussard et al (2018) likewise demonstrate how maker economies utilize multiple sources in urban ecosystems within which makers are integrated, whereas start-up entrepreneurs opportunistically exploit the brokerage mechanisms of accelerators to enhance connections to networks and capital outside the actual space and across territorial boundaries (Brown, Mawson, Lee, & Peterson, 2019).…”

“…Against this background, start-up incubators and accelerators have been established as instruments to foster student entrepreneurship and university spin-off activities (Bliemel, Flores, De Klerk, & Miles, 2019;Breznitz, Clayton, Defazio, & Isett, 2018;Wright, Siegel, & Mustar, 2017) thus creating additional complements in knowledgeintensive entrepreneurial ecosystems (Malecki, 2018;Mason & Brown, 2014;Pitelis, 2012;Spigel, 2017;Stam, 2015). In this line of thinking, Open Creative Labs are complements within a wider network of financial, social, and material resources for (maker) entrepreneurs who organize the production, marketing, and sales of their products without the organizational setting of a firm (Doussard et al, 2018). Against this background, work-oriented Open Creative Labs have been framed as novel forms of social urban infrastructures (Holman, 2015;Merkel, 2015;Montgomery, 2007) that also take on organizational functions (Schmidt & Brinks, 2017) for coordinating entrepreneurial and creative processes.…”