Anderson believes that in the last five years age-old models for manufacturing and distribution have been eroded by an overwhelming wave of technological currents centered around web-based collaboration and production.
“The web has made it easier to be an entrepreneur… For making physical goods, until four or five years ago, you really just didn’t have access to production. The world is oriented around companies and manufacturing was expensive and consuming. And then what’s happened is really two things; one is that it became a lot easier to create prototypes on your desktop that started onscreen.”
Anderson continues “Then you have the machine do the prototyping automatically, so you didn’t need any skills. Then you could take that same file and upload it all the way up to the factory to be mass produced. There are three big implications of this. First is that you don’t need special skills to create things now… Two, you don’t need a lot of money to get a prototype out there. And three, you can order production at any scale… So that was the structural change in the last four or five years.”
Anderson goes on to make an even more interesting observation about how this model can lead to significant economic growth.
“Now what we’re seeing here is a new kind of manufacturing—it’s not necessarily the 1950’s, 1960’s kind when you had massive companies and lots and lots of workers who were the middle class. Today, manufacturing that takes place in the West tends to be more automated, it tends to be more higher tech and it tends to have fewer jobs per product. But, you can have more of it. You can have more companies, more products in the manufacturing business because, again, the barriers to entry have fallen.”
Read the Entire Interview at Forbes
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