11–20 of 166 posts
The "maker movement" is alive in Shentzen, but mostly dead in Silicon Valley. TechShop is mostly crafters, not people building anything innovative. Hacker Dojo is appslaves. If there's a maker space in Silicon Valley with a pick and place machine, I can't find it.
Techshop is just a place to learn and build things, not to showcase your commercial or innovative products. Those stay back home in the garage.
> The common perception that China is incapable of innovation needs re-examining. No one is saying Chinese people can't innovate. The real question is whether Chinese people can innovate while inside China. (I wonder what percentage of current captains of industry in China studied abroad?) Why? Because innovation is essentially disrupting and rebelling against the status quo. ie breaking rules, disobedience, oppositi…
> The common perception that China is incapable of innovation needs re-examining. No one is saying Chinese people can't innovate. The real question is whether Chinese people can innovate while inside China. (I wonder what percentage of current captains of industry in China studied abroad?) Why? Because innovation is essentially disrupting and rebelling against the status quo. ie breaking rules, disobedience, oppositi…
Well, given Shenzens whole shtick since its inception is just that I'm pretty optimistic about its "freedom".
The "maker movement" is alive in Shentzen, but mostly dead in Silicon Valley. TechShop is mostly crafters, not people building anything innovative. Hacker Dojo is appslaves. If there's a maker space in Silicon Valley with a pick and place machine, I can't find it.
Pick and place machines are used for volume pcb production - not the kind of thing one would expect to find in your average maker space AFAIK.
The "maker movement" is alive in Shentzen, but mostly dead in Silicon Valley. TechShop is mostly crafters, not people building anything innovative. Hacker Dojo is appslaves. If there's a maker space in Silicon Valley with a pick and place machine, I can't find it.
"TechShop is mostly crafters, not people building anything innovative." Techshop is just a place to learn and build things, not to showcase your commercial or innovative products. Those stay back home in the garage.
Order and disruptive innovation are not necessarily mutually exclusive. What happened to ordered disruptive innovation?
The "maker movement" is alive in Shentzen, but mostly dead in Silicon Valley. TechShop is mostly crafters, not people building anything innovative. Hacker Dojo is appslaves. If there's a maker space in Silicon Valley with a pick and place machine, I can't find it.
Pick and place machines are used for volume pcb production - not the kind of thing one would expect to find in your average maker space AFAIK.
I was in Shenzhen a few months back for the first time. I can only describe it as Disneyland for electronics enthusiasts. Going into all the specialized malls in Huaqiang Bei and seeing the entire supply chain in one building is amazing. Highly recommend that people interested in electronics hardware make a visit.
What I find particularly fascinating is that it provides powerful evidence that 'open' is innovative and 'closed' is stifling.
Early on in the tech business everything was 'open'. The IBM PC published the source code to the BIOS in its technical manual, Intel and Motorola documented all of the options on their chips and how to program them, early programmable logic (PALs and PLDs) were easy to program with available documentation.
As a result lots of people built a wide variety of devices and systems using those parts, and that supported (in the Bay Area at least) dozens of circuit board houses, small run manufacturers, fastener companies, assembly houses, and parts distributors.
Starting with 3D accelerator chips, documentation became locked up behind NDA walls, access to small quantities was nearly impossible, and it became harder and harder to build something out of off the shelf parts. Designers and inventors were held back, their reduced demand for services put pressure on the rest of the ecosystem and the vibrant economy around building hardware crashed and burned. The biggest loss was perhaps the small boutique chip houses that made interesting parts with a bit of this and a bit of that.
Reading Bunny's book and the economist's article it seems that a combination of "Gongkai" and many different small factories has created this environment in Shenzen. That is a good thing and bodes well for the future growth of the area (assuming it isn't crushed by the powers that be). I'd love to figure out how to rekindle that here in the Bay Area.
> The common perception that China is incapable of innovation needs re-examining. No one is saying Chinese people can't innovate. The real question is whether Chinese people can innovate while inside China. (I wonder what percentage of current captains of industry in China studied abroad?) Why? Because innovation is essentially disrupting and rebelling against the status quo. ie breaking rules, disobedience, oppositi…
Although the Japanese were not imprisoning people "like A1 WW", they were bowing and obeying when they ushered the era of consumer electronics a few decades ago. Now it's the turn of the Chinese.