Electronics supplier SparkFun designs dozens of products a year and they haven’t patented a single one. It’s worked out pretty well so far.
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Design Like No One Is Patenting - How SparkFun Stays Ahead of the Pack - 0 views
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makes its living by shipping kits and components like bread boards, servo motors and Arduino parts to a mixture of students, hobbyists, and professionals making prototypes
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the company has made its name is in a stable of its own custom parts and kits, the designs for which it gives away for free.
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“We find that people will copy your design no matter what you do,” she says. “You might as well just play the game and go ahead and innovate. It’s fun, it keeps us on our toes.”
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the open hardware model means that SparkFun’s existence depends not on any particular product, but on an ongoing relationship with customers that’s not too dissimilar to the loyalty commanded by a fashion house.
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You can learn a lot about what a company cares about by looking at what they give away and what they protect.
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SparkFun’s actual value is in the community of fans and loyal customers that keep coming back, and the expertise under its roof in servicing their needs.
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“We have to be willing to kill ideas that don’t work, take a lot of tough criticism, and move fast. If we stay agile, we stay relevant.”
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“We try to do small runs and order in small quantities. Especially something that’s going to be obsolete quickly.”
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along with inventory and CMS management, tries to predict demand for different components and ensure they get ordered with sufficient lead time to account for how long it takes to get there.
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the innovation (revisions and new releases) here at SparkFun is organic and not planned,” says Boudreaux, “But we do a few things to make sure we are keeping up.”
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monitors all costumer feedback from emails to the comment section that is present on every page of the company’s site. They also ensure that team members have time to tinker in the office, write tutorials, and visit hackerspaces and maker events. “For us, designing (and revising) widgets is the job.”
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“They eat these products up, even if the products are not ready for the mainstream & educator community due to minimal documentation or stability.”
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symbiotic relationship with these early adopters, where feedback helps SparkFun revised and improve products for use by the rest of the community
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“There’s balance in everything,” says Boudreaux, “Innovation does not necessarily need speed in order to create valuable change. Sometimes innovation works at a slower pace, but that does not mean it is any less valuable to those that benefit from it, and we are constantly balancing the needs of two very different customers.”
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The Revolution at hand - Op-Ed - Domus - 0 views
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Currently, our education prepares us to perform a job — at times any job — that pays us in terms of what we can possess and consume or, in other words, the goods that design and mass production consider to be to our satisfaction — at least partially.
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creating almost nonexistent necessities that are readily available and easy to narrate rather than investigating the problems and real needs of people and communities
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the need for large-scale production is disappearing due to the crystalline democratization of the means of production
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unable to model the exchanges that serve to give way to a new mode of radically inclusive and more equitable cooperative production
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Innovation and meaning have been restricted, trapped and suffocated by mechanisms of protection, monopolies, patents and copyrights.
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If you're lucky you will have patrons, not customers. Customers barely exist in the creative world now.
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A new distributed network of places of cultural and tangible production must be affirmed. The network will stem from fablabs, makerspaces and hackerspaces — the new factories — around the world, or from ambitious projects like the Italian Bottega 21: initiatives that unite the existing cultural heritage of places and traditions with currently available technologies
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We will teach students to investigate, discover and create work, products and services that the community needs, rather than merely follow any old curriculum while waiting for a "phantom" labour market to claim them
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"The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not 'how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology', but 'how can we organize a society around something other than employment?'