Conseguem imaginar...

Interessante que uma revista como a "strategy+business" publique um artigo sobre Mongo, "A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Fabrication":

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"This question is central to most manufacturing business models. Ten units of a comb — or an automobile component, a book, a toy, or any industrially produced item — typically cost a lot more per unit to produce than 10,000 would. The price per unit goes down even more if you make 100,000, and much more if you make 10 million. But what happens to conventional manufacturing business models, or to the very concept of economies of scale, when millions of manufactured items are made, sold, and distributed one unit at a time? (Moi ici: Sim, "What happens"...) We’re about to find out.

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Millions of customers consume manufactured goods, and now a small but growing number are producing, designing, and marketing them as well. As operations, product development, and distribution processes evolve under the influence of this new disruptive technology, manufacturing innovation will further expand from the chief technology officer’s purview to that of the consumer, with potentially enormous impact on the business models of today’s manufacturers. (Moi ici: Assim como a conversão do país para as exportações, que não pagam IVA, deu cabo do modelo de impostagem do Estado, também estes novos modelos de negócio vão transformar, transtornar e alterar o modelo de impostagem, de distribuição, de design, de produção, ...)

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Now, the devices [impressoras 3D] are being applied to end-product manufacturing by a burgeoning number of small-scale manufacturers and one-person factories. (Moi ici: Uma nova paisagem industrial)

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a manufacturing business model that no longer depends only on economies of scale.

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How is one factory making 1 million units different from 10,000 factories making 100 units? For one thing, the 10,000 factories offer the safety and ability to experiment that comes with redundancy. For another, they offer proximity to local customers, and thus useful information about their needs and wants. Having a large number of small shops immediately at hand ensures that when one shop is not available, another can be brought into service. The rapid tooling turnaround afforded by digital fabrication means that each shop can change production runs for different clients as needed. The ability to augment mass production with highly customized components and parts, to reduce inventory by making components on demand, or to make setup changes more rapidly at a lower cost, could dramatically affect supply chain design, finance, and management.

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The makers who start and run these enterprises don’t work alone. Nor do they rely on university or company labs, as innovators did in the past. Instead, they are forming open source collaboratives and workshops that take advantage of the dropping costs of digital fabrication and the connectivity of social media. In the past few years, many informal workshop collaboratives have sprung up around the world. These spaces are not centrally owned or organized, but they share information collectively and help one another advance.

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Within the maker culture, people are expected to publish their plans and specifications, typically under an open source license, which allows others to copy, adapt, and learn from the designs, always with credit and mutual access to ideas. Makers tend to design their business models accordingly. They make short runs of each product and make frequent changes based on customer feedback; two makers might work together easily while creating competing products that draw on each other’s specifications.

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As early as 2020, every auto dealership and home improvement retailer may have a backroom production shop printing out parts and tools as needed.

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Large manufacturers might outsource designs to local micro-factories, leveraging supply chains to build highly responsive production networks. Unions might help their laid-off members become entrepreneurs, providing group buying power for health insurance as well as materials and services. Whether digital fabrication will have this kind of transformative effect on troubled economies isn’t known; indeed, no one can predict exactly how the new, disruptive technology will play out. But we can already guess at the capabilities that will be needed by manufacturers to win in this new game. The history of digital technology suggests that the winners will be those that embrace decentralized models, exchanging the kinds of information, materials, fabrication processes, knowledge, and labor that, for the first time, can travel freely across a network of avid makers."

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Conseguem imaginar como o mundo vai ser mais diferente, mais diverso e menos normalizado?