By Neil Cummings
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
A Harold S Truman quote reworded by Reagan, reinterpreted in many management books and retweeted everywhere else.
It’s a funny quote. On first impressions it suggests an open, ego-agnostic leadership style, but add the context in which it’s usually delivered (presidential addresses, intellectual audiences, company pep talks) and the cynics among us will say it’s a way to make sure a leader can claim the credit for the fruits of credit-less approach.
The same tension between openness and recognition is playing out for brands as we see the trend of ‘making’ hit the mainstream.
The maker movement, powered by its maker spirit, is one of sharing ideas and knowledge, teaching skills, opening processes, giving access to tools, obsessive collaboration and iterative building on the experiments of others.
The good vibes emanating from the maker communities around open hardware products like Arduino and raspberry pi are starting to make waves in boardrooms around the world. But it’s hard not to feel a little cynicism as more and more businesses start talking about embracing the makers when we know their corporate behaviour revolves around protecting their IP.
To avoid making becoming just another corporate buzzword it’s essential that we think about ways that competitive businesses can genuinely embrace this.
What is the boardroom ready, boxable version of making that allows big businesses to play their part? How do we package it in a way that it stays pure and powerful? That it demands more from businesses than consumer customisation or scrambling together a video of a half hearted hack day. How do we ensure making equals a reinvigorated sense of experimentation, new, potentially scary levels of openness and unexpected collaboration that transforms the things they make, the way they make them and what their customers can make with them?
It’s no wonder that making is attractive to brands. Allowing customers to make something of their own with things you provide creates a much deeper, more personal bond with a product. Asking people outside a business to see what they can come up with uncovers new needs and outsources expensive R&D.
Showcasing an active maker community, a group of customers so passionate that they’re helping you make your products better, scores massive brand kudos.
But it’s a scary territory too. It means opening up certain parts of your IP and risking loosing competitive advantage. It means dramatically decreasing the time to market and being prepared to launch things that may not be perfect. It means being comfortable with not knowing exactly what might be next in the pipeline or that people may find uses for things that you hadn’t intended and weren’t prepared for.
Two big brands that have recently changed their stance on maker communities spring to mind. IKEA threatened the site ikeahackers.net with legal actions as their members mixed and matched furniture parts into new playful mash-ups that anyone could recreate. They now quietly fund it.
Microsoft too initially moved to prevent people hacking their kinect motion sensor before embracing the community showing them the true potential of what they had created.
Both realised that appearing to care less about who took the credit really means you can claim much more.
Brands born from the maker movement walk this line, effortlessly combining product and community, branded and user generated, your-ingenuity-thanks-to-us.com
Sugru for example, made by makers for makers, is a brand that simply channels the creativity of its customers to sell more of its universal fixing solution.
And of course there’s Youtube. A partner and platform for the maker movement. A brand entirely reliant on the energy and diversity of the people making with and for it.
So how can a business that hasn’t had the luxury of growing with makers in mind now invite the world to play and how do they make sure the donation of time and skills feels like a fair exchange?
Platform thinking shows certain industries beginning to figure this out. It means being clear about what is fixed and what you’re allowing people to play with.
The app ecosystem from Apple took a huge first step. They invited everyone with an idea and some technical skills to create mini business that they could push to their millions of customers.
The trouble is Apple’s platform feels surrounded by some pretty hefty walls. The maker spirit, openness at its heart, is encased in a shiny gorilla glass cage, accessible by an almost masonic finger swipe, pinch or well-aimed poke at the iInterface.
Google’s android feels fairer to makers giving them the freedom to share their wares wider but, again, the real experience and use is still dictated by an army of competing handset manufacturers locked in lawsuits with case and counter case over the most meaningless of product details.
One can’t help wondering about the impact that could be created if manufacturers could apply the same innovation seen from makers in software environments to their hardware processes.
Well, here’s one someone else made earlier.
With one giant thunderclap Dave Hakkens told the world about phone blocks. An idea that shows us a glimpse of a fantastic future where businesses can wholeheartedly embrace the maker spirit.
Phone blocks is a hardware platform for a mobile handset that enables you to customise your ‘what used to be a phone’ into whatever you want it to be. It’s based around a simple motherboard onto which components can be attached.
A new platform that established businesses, small start-ups and independent makers alike.
Ron Ekkers’ product vision film suggests that if you love music you should get the marshal amp block.
Love taking pictures? Add a Fuji camera block. Worried about your newborn? Stick on the baby monitor. Got a broken screen or want a better one? Swap out the component.
This idea, as with it’s proceeding app platforms, creates an instant market for the ingenuity of makers and allows them to work much more broadly but it’s bigger than that.
It accelerates the innovation and dissemination of mobile technology beyond belief. It changes the role of the mobile handset and the telco networks that support it beyond recognition. It builds towards a future that is more sustainable and less wasteful. And it takes the making spirit and creates a way for it to have the positive impact on society that it deserves. And it’s clearly working, Google and Motorola have quickly partnered with him.
A similar debate debate rages is the microprocessor industry. Niche? Bit geeky? Maybe, but not when you think about how many connected devices will be powered by them in the future - rough estimates suggest around 50bn by 2015.
The connected future will be made possible by companies like ARM who are providing another example of the maker spirit employed by a big business.
ARM operates a business model reliant on an ecosystem of maker partners. It requires, as they call it, a grown up approach to collaboration. One that recognises that ARM makes money from the licensing of chip design IP whilst still allowing them to develop it further with partner businesses for new applications.
ARM positively revels in the multitude of uses that other businesses find for their low power chip designs. They are committed to growing their ecosystem and lowering the barrier to entry for new businesses to get a product to market. They are always quick to evangelise the power of their approach over a closed and focused innovation approach, which would force makers to be happy with what they’re given.
As a result ARM has its chip designs in (90%) of the worlds connected devices and with the market expected to grow to 48,000 million unit shipments of chips a year in 2020. It seems like a more than sustainable strategy.
This begs the question of what other industries could be transformed if we were to open up the supply chain? If we let makers in concentrated directed bursts, with businesses clear about the relationships they need to create to seat more makers at the boardroom table.
So here’s my plea to businesses inspired by the maker movement. Three rules to ensure businesses nurture makers not apply them as marketing:
Disrupt the supply chain. What can you let people outside of your business play with, add to, rethink? How can you support them in doing this?
Own the platform. How can everyone’s ideas build the relevance of something that only you provide?
Think fair exchange. How can your platform reward people’s hard work by supercharging their ideas (customers, distribution, social impact)?
Making is as much a mindset as it is an activity. It’s a mindset which, if applied properly, shows us it’s amazing what you can accomplish as long as you’re happy to share the credit.
Neil Cummings is a creative director at Wolff Olins London.