If you’re an inventor or even just a tinkerer, acquiring a well-stocked space to create can often be an expensive prospect. The cost of the needed equipment used to be a roadblock for many would be inventors, but places known as “maker's labs” are starting to change that.
Its 5:00 p.m. on a Friday evening and the warehouse floor of the Chandler-based makers lab known as TechShop is starting to fill up. Over in the machine shop area, engineer Steven Bible is shaping a sheet of metal using a device known as a mill.
"I’m working on a steam locomotive. It’s going to be at a one-and-a-half inch scale," Bible said. "It’ll be strong and powerful enough to allow many people to ride on it."
Bible is here working on a personal project for the Maricopa Live Steamers, a Valley railroad club he’s involved with. While TechShop has many members like Bible, a large contingent of the membership is here for business. Sales manager Jason Black explained how some of the facility’s Fortune 500 memberships use the space.
"They can use our equipment versus investing large amounts of money into the equipment not knowing whether it’s going to be what they need," said Black. "They come down here, they determine the proof of concept and then they can take it to market."
But general manager Mitch Eikren added members with small businesses use the area, too. He compared the space to an extremely well-outfitted garage.
"We have in excess of a $1 million worth of equipment in this shop, so it’s out of reach for a lot of people," Eikren said.
But at this and the handful of other maker's spaces that have opened around the Valley, access to large and what can be expensive equipment is within reach through a much more affordable monthly membership, a business model that’s proved to be very appealing to Valley residents.
This democratization of tools is known at the “maker movement."
"I just see this as much more likely the avenue for young innovative people than was the case say, 30 or 40 years ago, when people looked for the old line-manufacturing position," said Dennis Hoffman, an economist at Arizona State University.
"It does seem to me that it augments the traditional research and development process. It certainly doesn’t replace it," he said. "This is going to be dynamic, constantly evolving and some interesting opportunities for all."
Large corporations are using the machines for prototyping, which saves them money, because outsourcing that process can be expensive. But for the independent entrepreneur, these makers spaces provide them the capital to create without being tied to a company, said John Hagel, the co-chairman for Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, a corporate research firm based in San Jose, Calif.
"Increasingly, I think some of the creative talent who previously compromised and joined a large company because that was the only place where they could have that kind of impact had to compromise as a result, because it was a mass market kind of culture, are now making the choice to go off on their own and set up their own shop," Hagel said.
Hagel said the maker movement is still in the early stages and will likely continue to grow, not only in Arizona, but across the world.
