在上世纪四十年代早期，我祖父有一个很妙的想法。加利福利亚人对绿油油的前院草坪近乎痴狂的态度，使他断定大家最需要的是自动洒水系统。祖父即对此倾注了大量的时间与热情，造造这个，修修那个。有一天他终于做出了一个电钟，能被设定在全天的不同时段开闭水阀。1943年这一创作正式申请专利，专利号是2311108，我的祖父开始拿着自己的创作到处拜访制造商以求生产。这一路漫长而艰辛。终于在1950年，看似无止境的讨论之后，Moody Rainmaster上市，为祖父赚了点钱。
最近，我决定跟随他的步伐，但再用上21世纪的智慧。在网上，我找到一些对制造改良喷水系统感兴趣的同好。我们用开源软件做设计，新的喷水系统不仅能让度假的园丁通过应用程序进行远程控制，还智能得足以根据最新的天气预报来决定是否开闭系统。之后我们将设计送往封装厂，准时收到了漂亮的成品。产品很受欢迎。我的祖父用了十年时间和不少钱来完善产品并将其推向市场。而我们，只用了几个月和5000美金。
简言之，这就是创客运动——运用互联网和最新的工业技术进行创造。在过去的十年里，网络被用于寻找新的合作方式以及提供服务。但我相信，在接下来的十年间，人们会将网络的智慧用于现实世界之中。意思是，未来不止属于建立在虚拟原则之上的网络公司，也属于那些深深扎根于现实世界的产业。
这不仅对于准企业家，也将对国民经济产生重大影响。事实是，任何一个企图保持强盛的国家，都须有制造业基础。即使在今天，仍有约四分之一的美国经济有赖于实体物品的生产。服务经济固然很好，却消减了制造业，使国家处处是银行家、速食餐厅和导游。至于软件和信息行业，尽管备受瞩目，但也只解决了小部分人的就业问题。
发展中的创客运动为制造业的再发动铺了条路，不是朝向旧时的拥有大批雇员的巨型工厂，而是开创了一种新型的制造经济。这一经济的形成就更像是网络本身：自下而上，分布广泛，高度企业化。未来制造业的图景会是这样：一些聪明人依靠着网络联结和一个好的想法就能改变世界。
但凡有着不错产品构想的人都能在互联网取得空前的成功，这几乎已是陈腔滥调。因为线上创业几乎没有任何进入障碍：只要你有一台电脑和一张信用卡，你就能开始。传统的制造业则完全不同，但在过去的几年间，显著的改变发生了。实物的制造过程越来越趋近于数字产品的制造过程。
各式创新在推动这一改变。首先，当然是互联网的众包力量——你不了解的问题，网上总有人知道答案。在博客或是论坛发布寻求帮助的信息，就等着其他人来帮你吧。其次，越来越智能的设计软件能将概念直接转化为可操作的文档。正如文字处理软件愈加易于操作且用户界面更为直观，CAD(电脑辅助设计）软件也更加精巧且容易使用。你提供设计，CAD帮你考虑如何生产。
还有第一代3D打印机的诞生。屏幕图形被转化为三维物体（用好莱坞制作电脑特技的工具设计三维图形，再转化为可使用的实物）。一类机器一层层喷出熔化的塑料，进行打印。还有一些是以激光硬化粉状或液状的树脂，成品由混合的原材料而来。另一些机器，能用各种材料生产，从玻璃、钢铁、青铜到金、钛甚至是蛋糕的糖霜。你可以打印出一支长笛或是一块肉。你甚至可以打印出活细胞构成的人体器官，只要将带有悬浮干细胞的液体喷射到模型中。
重点是，这一技术的应用与其说是现状，不如说是将来的发展态势。三维打印机，激光切割机和CNC(计算机数控）机器，这些用一个小小钻头加工大块材料的机器，已是足够精密的仪器了。几年前，它们好像还只存在于科幻小说中，但我猜它们构筑了10年内科技的发展走向，正如上世纪八十年代的点阵打印机进化为如今家用的彩色激光打印机。即使现在，科学家仍在讨论用“结构DNA”造物的制造工具。换言之，科技仍有很长的发展道路要走。然而，开放之意已在其中，我相信一旦这思想与网络创新相结合，将产生巨大的制造力。
首先，这一科技解除了创新的枷锁。迄今为止，创新进程常遭困扰。阻碍来自生产产品原型的内在问题，来自劝服第三方加入的困难，亦来自产品发布的经费。当然，谁还不能保证最后一定会成功。
但是，现状在创新及销售阶段都有所变化。
以Alex Andon为例，06年毕业之后，他搬去旧金山湾区从事生物技术工作。但Andon最热爱的是水母，当他还是个少年时，在维京群岛的一次航行中他第一次见到这种生物。他辞了工作，在朋友的车库中成立了一个公司，专门生产定制化的水母箱。他设计了特殊的水泵，解决了传统水泵会吸进水母并撕成裂片的问题，新的水流系统能让水母远离池壁和LED彩灯。这确实是了不起的创作。
Alex的水母箱
更为Alex加分的，是他在将产品推向市场前的测试能力。他选择通过众筹网站Kick Starter以观察人们是否对这一新产品感兴趣。如果答案是肯定的，那他就以产品优惠为回报邀请人们为他投资。他的筹款目标是三千美元。而在一个月之后，他筹得了超过十三万美元。他不仅完成了市场调查，还找到了他的第一批用户，这样就不需承担在仓库（甚至他的卧室）中囤积大量水母箱的风险。
不难发现，创客科技太适用于此类利基产业。识货的人或是忠心用户，很可能早已为适合的产品存在，多亏了互联网，找到这群人也变得容易多了。
目前的制造科技为创客助力的另一点是，诸如个性化塑料玩具及定做的成衣等订制产品，有了更理想的小批量生产条件。传统工厂的做法是，一个设计批量生产。开工的花费不菲，但大量生产又有规模经济补偿。而对3D打印机来说，开工成本很低，却不会形成规模经济，生产第150件产品和第1件产品的成本是一样的。这阻碍其在大众市场取得成功，却能在本质上价格敏感度很低的利基市场占一席之地。
此外，只要你愿意你能让每一件产品都个性化：第150件产品不用和第100件在外观上完全相似。而且你只要在家就能生产，你可以用你自己的3D打印机（目前已降价至约1000美元），也可以将设计文档交付给配备有必要设备的第三方。
话虽如此，我却并不认为创客产业注定要小规模发展。当然，大多数创客选择仅为某一特定市场提供定制产品。但创客科技要开创企业，总要先对产品进行试用调查，对顾客反馈做出回应，而他人即可以此为商机，建立一个大型的公司。与之产业相对应的敏感度及灵活性，将根植于他们的内核之中，使之比别的公司更胜一筹。
想象一个叫WindCo的新公司，推出了自己的第一款产品：小型后院风力发电机。就像其他少数人一样，他们自己生产了第一件产品原型。现在到了正规投产的阶段，因为WindCo规模很小，没有充足的制造力，所以他们将一小部分产品外包给了中国的廉价工厂。
如果产品获得成功并构建了市场需求，他们很可能选择将产地移回国内以避免交货的延期。但如果产品空前大卖，那么他们可能决心将生产线移至另一家专业于大量生产的中国工厂。他们需要灵活应对不时变化中的企业状况。他们也具备灵活应对的能力：设计图纸是电子版的，创建新的制造业务所需的工装费用是最低的，并且他们使用的是同一种机械设备。
这种适应性很强的产业，在将来仍需应对不同的情境。它需要与顾客保持固定的联系，并快速应对他们的反馈与批评。它亦要求从业者能随处吸收利用知识，而不是等着人才上门。以我经营的一个小型遥控飞机企业为例，我的合伙人不是通过广告寻得的，我是在自己管理的一个论坛上发现了这个提出绝妙点子的热心人。
科罗拉多一家公司的成功证明了这种模式是可行的，Sparkfun所处电子业是竞争最为惨烈的商业领域之一。2003年，公司创始人Nathan还是一个工程专业的本科生，他发现要为自己的项目寻找合适的电子组件实在是太困难了。现在，Sparkfun设计并制造定制化的印刷电路板，通过高精度的拾取-放置自动机械来组装产品。官方网站上的博客是一大亮点，以员工发布的教程和视频为主要内容，用户在网站论坛上相互帮助。
公司的雇员很年轻、充满激情且显然很热爱自己的工作。办公室放任你带宠物或是别的爱好（当然生产车间除外），纹身和独立朋克摇滚乐能反映公司文化。这一形象与“黑暗撒旦磨坊”的制造业景象相去甚远，事实上，这家企业更像创业期的软件公司那样特立独行。
Sparkfun无疑是成功的。如今，公司已经拥有超过120名雇员，年收入高达三千万，且正在以每年50%的速度增长。篮球场大小的一楼被自动化电子生产线占据，日夜不停地运转着。每日更新的博文和教程，让一个零售网站成了流量巨大的社区，每天有超过五万用户访问。
创客运动还将有很长一段路要走才能迎来自己的时代。但它仍不可小觑，且不该仅被视为玩家或制造业利基市场的天堂。创客迈出了以不同方式运转商业的第一步。不同于一些巨型企业自上而下的创新，我们看见从下而上的创新力量，正来源于业余爱好者、企业家和专业人士等数不清的个人。而这种个体的力量已经在数字世界展示，从聪颖的电脑爱好者到网民联盟。现在再度发力的时机已到，它将在更宏伟更广泛的尺度亦或是原子间产生影响。如果说第二次工业革命是信息时代，那么我想说，第三次工业革命正要到来，正是创客时代。
Back in the early 1940s my grandfather had a great idea. Noting the obsession Californians have with perfectly green front lawns, he decided that what they needed was an automatic sprinkler system. He lavished time and love on it, inventing this and fine-tuning that, and eventually came up with what was essentially an electric clock that could be timed to turn water valves on or off at given times of the day and night. Patent number 2311108 was duly filed in 1943, at which point my grandfather started knocking on manufacturers' doors. It was a long, arduous process. Finally, in 1950, after endless discussions, the Moody Rainmaster hit the stores. It earned my grandfather a modest income.
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Recently, I decided to follow in his footsteps, but apply a little 21st-century know-how to the mix. Online I found a few like-minded souls interested in producing an improved water sprinkler. We used open-source software to help us create a sprinkler system not only capable of being operated remotely via an app by worried gardeners on holiday, but also sophisticated enough to factor in the latest local weather forecasts before deciding whether to switch the system on or off. We then sent our designs to an assembly house who duly came up with a smart-looking finished product. It has proved quite popular. It took my grandfather a decade and a small fortune to perfect his device and market it. It took us a few months and $5,000.
And that in a nutshell is the Maker movement – harnessing the internet and the latest manufacturing technologies to make things. The past 10 years have been about discovering new ways to work together and offer services on the web. The next 10 years will, I believe, be about applying those lessons to the real world. It means that the future doesn't just belong to internet businesses founded on virtual principles. but to ones that are firmly rooted in the physical world.
This has massive implications not just for would-be entrepreneurs but for national economies. The fact is that any country, if it wants to remain strong, must have a manufacturing base. Even today, about a quarter of the US economy rests on the creation of physical goods. A service economy is all well and good, but eliminate manufacturing and you're a nation of bankers, burger flippers and tour guides. As for software and information industries, they may get all the press, but they employ just a small percentage of the population.
The nascent Maker movement offers a path to reboot manufacturing – not by returning to the giant factories of old, with their armies of employees, but by creating a new kind of manufacturing economy, one shaped more like the web itself: bottom-up, broadly distributed, and highly entrepreneurial. The image of a few smart people changing the world with little more than an internet connection and an idea increasingly describes manufacturing of the future, too.
It's almost a cliche that anyone with a sufficiently good software idea can create a fabulously successful company on the web. That's because there are practically no barriers preventing entry to entrepreneurship online: if you've got a laptop and a credit card, you're in business. Manufacturing has traditionally been regarded as something else entirely. But over the past few years, something remarkable has begun to happen. The process of making physical stuff has started to look more like the process of making digital stuff.
Various innovations are helping to make this possible. The first, of course, is the crowdsourcing power of the internet – if you don't know all the answers, there is someone out there who will. Put out a call for help on a blog or online forum, and somewhere there will be an expert prepared to help you. The second innovation is the increasing sophistication of design programs that can take raw ideas and transform them into executable files. Just as word-processing software has become ever simpler and more intuitive for the user, so Cad (computer-aided design) programs are becoming simultaneously more sophisticated and easier to handle. You design something; the Cad program works out how it can be produced.
And then there is the first generation of 3D printers. These take "geometries" on screen (3D objects that are created with the same sorts of tools that Hollywood uses to make computer generated movies and turn them into objects that you can pick up and use. Some 3D printers extrude molten plastic in layers to make these objects, while others use a laser to harden layers of liquid or powder resin so the product emerges from a bath of the raw material. Yet others can make objects out of any material from glass, steel and bronze to gold, titanium or even cake frosting. You can print a flute or you can print a meal. You can even print human organs of living cells, by squirting a fluid with suspended stem sells on to a support matrix.
What's important here is not so much current reality as potential. 3D printers, laser cutters and "CNC" (computer numerical control) machines, which use a drill bit to shape a block of material, are already sophisticated devices – a few years ago they would have seemed distinctly sci-fi – but I suspect that they resemble the technology of 10 years hence in much the same way that the primitive single-colour dot matrix printers of the 1980s resemble the colour laser printers we having sitting in our homes today. Even now scientists are talking about creating manufacturing tools that use "structural DNA" to create physical objects. In other words, the technology still has a long journey to make. However, its liberating implications are already there, and I believe that when they are combined with other online innovations, a very powerful manufacturing force is created.
First of all, such technology helps remove the shackles from innovation. Until now, the creative process has been beset with obstacles, from the problems inherent in creating a prototype, to the difficulties of persuading a third party to become involved, to the expense of the final launch. And, of course, there's no guarantee of ultimate success.
Now, however, things are looking rather different, both at the innovation and the selling stages.
Take Alex Andon, for example. After graduating in 2006, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for a biotech job. But his real passion was jellyfish, which he had first encountered while sailing in the British Virgin Islands as a teenager. He quit his job and set up a company in a friend's garage to make custom jellyfish tanks with special pumps (a conventional pump will suck in a jellyfish and rip it to pieces), custom water-flow systems to keep the jellyfish off the sides and colourful LED lighting. That in itself was no small feat.
Alex Andon's jellyfish tank.
Where Alex also scored, though, was in his ability to test the market before he launched his product. He opted to go via the crowdfunding website Kickstarter to see whether people were interested in what he could offer them. If they were, he invited them to help fund his start-up in return for one of his Desktop Jellyfish Tanks at a discount. His aim was to raise $3,000. After a month he had raised more than $130,000. He had managed both to market-test his idea and find his first customers without having to go to the risky expense of first filling a warehouse (or his bedroom) with jellyfish tanks.
It's not difficult to see how Maker technology suits this sort of niche enterprise. The chances are that a savvy and committed market already exists for the right product, and, thanks to the internet, it's relatively easy to find it. What's more the current manufacturing technology that supports Makers is ideally suited to small batches of bespoke products – from customised plastic toys to tailored clothes. With a conventional factory, you fix on a design and mass-produce it; start up is expensive, but mass-production involves compensating economies of scale. With a 3D printer, start up is cheap, but there are no economies of scale to be gained: product number 150 will cost you precisely the same to create as product number 1. That precludes success in the mass market, but does set you up to succeed in a niche market that by its very nature is less price sensitive.
Moreover, you can, if you choose, make every item bespoke: number 150 does not have to be precisely the same in appearance as number 100. And you can manufacture at home, perhaps using your own 3D printer (in the US prices are already dropping to $1,000) or sending your files to a third party fitted out with the necessary kit.
Having said that, I don't believe that Makers enterprises have to remain small-scale. Many, of course, will opt to do so, creating customised goods for a specialist market. Others, though, can utilise all that the Maker technology has to offer to get an enterprise off the ground, road test its products, respond to customer feedback, and then build a larger-scale company. What they'll have going for them in addition – and it's something that many larger companies lack – is agility and flexibility built into their DNA.
Imagine a new company, WindCo, making its first product: a small backyard wind turbine generator. They make the first prototype themselves, as well as a handful of others. Then, it's time to go into serious production. WindCo is small, and they don't have sufficient manufacturing capacity themselves, so they outsource to a factory in China that can handle small batches cheaply.
If the product is successful and demand builds, they may well opt to move production back home to cut out delays. If it's astonishingly successful, then they may decide to move production to a different factory in China that specialises in bulk manufacturing. They have to be flexible because their business is constantly evolving. They are able to be flexible because their design files are digital, the tooling costs of setting up a new manufacturing operation are minimal, and they all use the same robotic machinery.
This adaptive business of the future will need to be accommodating in other ways, too. It needs to be in constant contact with its customers and be prepared to respond quickly to their feedback and criticism. It needs to be able to draw on skills wherever they are, not merely on people who happen to be close to home. The co-founder of a small robot aeroplane enterprise I run, for example, is not someone who answered an ad, but an enthusiast who came to my attention when he started posting inspired ideas for improvements on a online forum I was hosting.
That this can work is demonstrated by the success of a Colorado-based company, Sparkfun, which operates in one of the most ruthlessly cut-throat of all areas of business – electronics. Back in 2003 its founder, Nathan Seidle, was an undergraduate engineering student, who was finding it frustratingly difficult to locate electronic components that he needed for his projects. Today, Sparkfun designs and manufactures specialist printed circuit boards, using sophisticated pick-and-place robot machines to assemble them. Its website makes a major feature of its blog, with chatty tutorials and videos from employees, and forums that are full of customers helping one another.
Its employees are young, passionate and appear to totally love their jobs. Dogs and hobbies are indulged at work (though not on the production floor); tattoos and indie punk rock reflect its culture. It's a far cry from the "dark satanic mill" vision of manufacturing – much closer in fact to the maverick image of software companies in their startup days.
And it works. Today Sparkfun has more than 120 employees and annual revenues of around $30 million. It's growing by 50% a year. A basketball-court-sized ground floor is dominated by robotic electronic production lines, running day and night. Daily blog posts and tutorials have turned its retail website into a high-traffic community, with more than 50,000 visitors a day.
The Maker movement has a long way to go before it can really be said to have come of age. But that doesn't mean it should be ignored or regarded solely as a hobbyist's or niche manufacturer's paradise. It represents the first steps in a different way of doing business. Rather than top-down innovation by some of the biggest companies in the world, we're starting to see bottom-up innovation by countless individuals, including amateurs, entrepreneurs and professionals. We've already seen it work before, in bits, from the original PC hobbyists to the web's citizen army. Now the conditions have arrived for it to work again, at even greater, broader scale, in atoms. If the Second Industrial Revolution was the Information Age, then I would argue that a Third Industrial Age is on its way: the age of the Makers.
