Enabling a Personalized, Low-Volume Future
Pulse
Octopart Staff
Oct 10, 2017

This is a guest blog by Chris Church, founder of MacroFab.

While some of the largest companies in the world continue to produce electronics on a massive scale, innovative engineers and makers are finding great success solving problems for smaller markets. Driven by the popularity of easy-to-access development ecosystems like Arduino, MBed, and LaunchPad, the barrier to designing and developing novel products gets lower every day. Inventors are designing more products to address niche markets, filling out the long tail of demand.

In the past, the skills required to create new electronics products were more difficult to come by, therefore engineers with the ability to create a product would sell the same design for years. The competition for smaller markets increased as these skills became easier to attain by lowering the barriers to entry for new products. Customers have come to expect greater features and are willing to buy products with new capabilities long before existing solutions have stopped working or become obsolete. Ultimately, the pace of innovation increases and inventors need to create new products regularly.

Bringing a new product to market is a challenge:

Crowdfunding helps to establish demand and raise capital for initial production, but the need to manage multiple vendors in the supply chain, handle customer support, and package and ship products all while continuing to develop new products, and keep on top of competition becomes a full-time job. Faced with uncertain success and substantial risk, inventors will often make the choice to not manufacture, leaving a number of great ideas off of the market. Many makers are developing new and innovative ideas that don’t become available to others due to the difficulty in productizing and delivering them.

New platforms address the entire product lifecycle:

To fully realize the potential of electronics to change the lives of consumers and not just makers through constant and rapid innovation, we need to create new platforms that enable inventors to quickly and easily bring their products to market. Inventors must have the ability to experiment, respond to feedback, and get their products in the hands of customers quickly and with minimum risk. To achieve this, these platforms will need to address the entire product lifecycle in one integrated system: from prototyping, manufacturing, and packaging, to providing flexibility to customize and tailor products to users’ needs while at the same time controlling and minimizing the final cost.

[caption id="attachment_3191" align="alignnone" width="720"]MacroFab In the chart above you can see the full idea to market services provided by new electronics manufacturing platforms such as MacroFab.[/caption]

Enabling inventors to experiment with new product ideas, and giving them the freedom to address multiple markets, means that these platforms must also enable the final mile to the customer. Picking, packing, and shipping orders takes time away from development of new products. Service solutions exist for managing fulfillment, but they don’t integrate well with existing manufacturing solutions and have complex management requirements, meaning that they are better suited for large-scale operations. To truly enable any idea to be brought to market, these new platforms must make it as easy to ship a product as they make it to manufacture a product – regardless of quantity.

Over the past five years, we’ve seen an explosion in services designed to make life easier for makers and inventors: from frictionless electronics manufacturing and instant-quote and ordering for 3D printed and machined components, to e-commerce solutions and open marketplaces for circuit boards. While these services have resulted in many new concepts and products available for purchase, the long tail of great ideas still remains largely untapped. New platforms like Crowd Supply, and like ours at MacroFab, have launched in the past couple of years to bridge the gap from idea to prototype, funding, manufacturing, and delivery.

As consumers demand greater customization and specialization, their needs will be better met by individual inventors and small startups, and less by large-volume manufacturers. The end-to-end and full-service platforms springing up today will fuel this movement to shift the balance of the market away from capital-intensive large-scale manufacturers to a greater personal connection between the maker and the consumer. We’re standing at the cusp of the next great product revolution – the personalized device world. Consumers will demand products from makers as much as they demand them from the growth-focused startups and large organizations. The only barrier that remains is to enable these makers to deliver their products as efficiently as their larger peers, without having to replicate the size of those organizations.

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