In the article "Doing with Hands," we discuss how the Maker movement has inverted the logic of creation for entrepreneurs and students. Now, these new strategies are reaching the innovation areas of large companies, bringing more economical and participatory processes.
Heloísa Neves, coordinator of the FabLab at Insper, founder of We Fab, and board member of FabLab Brazil, wrote her doctoral thesis on the boundary between the Maker movement and Innovation.
“When I started researching the topic ‘Maker Innovation,’ I began talking to many corporate entrepreneurs from large companies and with makers. One thing I noticed is that each side was very good at distinct things and that together they could be much more powerful. Companies are very good at scale, quality, and project implementation, but this rigor tends to take away a bit of the freshness and creativity from people,” she clarifies.
While rigor prevailed in large companies, Heloísa observed that in MakerSpaces and FabLabs, people had plenty of creativity and prototyped very quickly. “Something that is very complicated in a company is very simple in these spaces,” she emphasizes. This is where Maker Innovation began to emerge. A new proposal for innovation, following the same principle of the maker movement: innovating through doing.
In this process, traditional steps like conducting research, writing the project, and waiting for the idea to be completely finalized before making the first prototype cease to exist. “I start with the prototype. I gather a preferably multidisciplinary team, mix the team by bringing together makers and users, put everyone in a room, and prototype an idea. It may be that by the end of the day our conclusion is that it’s not quite right. It doesn’t matter if our decision is to prototype another idea the next day. In other words, through a somewhat reverse process, I can reduce costs with a much more agile process and a process that is much fresher in creativity,” she argues.
The environment also generates a relaxation that is good for innovation. “There’s this phrase we bring from the software universe: fail early, fail often, and fail cheaply,” she recalls. According to her, with software it seems simpler because everything is non-material. “We thought this didn’t apply to material because hardware has always had this engineering process practically. The process of raising all costs, thinking about quality, and only then materializing the idea,” she exemplifies.
According to the specialist, maker innovation brings a gain in project quality. “I heard a phrase from an innovation director at Renault that really struck me. He said: ‘I’m tired of coming in with a super expensive prototype from a finalized process that when we presented it to the board, they didn’t feel they could still be part of this process,’” she shares. “When I come in with a rough prototype made on a 3D printer and hand a marker to the person and say ‘let’s do this together,’ it’s something else. It’s much better than an expensive, finished prototype. That’s where real collaboration happens. That’s where this prototype truly becomes a communication object for the team, an object to be worked on,” she adds.
The resource economy is also another point in favor. It is not necessary to reach the end of a project to discover the result. Prototyping along the way enables a significant savings in investments. “If everyone creates a different project in their head and only after a year creates the prototype and checks if it’s really what we were thinking or not, that’s a delay for the project,” she assesses.
On the other hand, due to being such a different process, it still requires a lot of convincing work. “Sometimes, when we come in with a rough, unfinished prototype, we give the impression of being less serious, and we need to work around that,” she reflects. Still, Heloísa believes that the movement is gaining more and more strength. “In France, where I have more contact, where I did more research, there are very large laboratories, and these laboratories are connecting with engineering areas, with very serious fields. They have an association among companies that have internal makerspaces, and they formed an association among themselves to share knowledge,” she shares.
For her, the Maker movement is very creative, very impulsive, it moves very quickly, but it cannot sustain itself alone because makers lack management skills and the ability to build a financially sustainable ecosystem. “Having companies involved lends seriousness to the movement. People start to believe more in these spaces, begin to invest in projects, and this brings financial sustainability to the Maker movement, and there is also an exchange of knowledge that helps the Maker movement grow and deepen,” she concludes.
