For all the wonderful things that mass production has given us -- inexpensive clothes, reliable transportation, giant TVs -- it hasn't done much for people who want to make things. An idea for, say, a piece of furniture, is useless without access to machines, boats, trucks, and retail buyers. "If you think about it, there are two functions to a product: You need to design the thing, and you need to somehow fabricate it," von Hippel says. These functions have long been tied together, but companies like Ponoko, which allow designers to create products without owning any expensive equipment, are changing that. "We're no longer trapped by mass production," von Hippel says.
In many respects, Ponoko looks like your average 21st-century tech start-up. It has a small staff (five employees and a handful of part-timers), scant revenue ($250,000 a year), and a slick website that lets users displaced all over the world communicate with one another. But although Ponoko has the trappings of a hundred tiny Web start-ups, the end product isn't one-sentence messages or a weird news item.
On Ponoko you can buy a Bloom Lamp or any other product that has been uploaded by a community of thousands of designers, of both the professional and part-time variety. And because nothing is made until it's ordered, you can modify designs according to your taste. Materials are flexible, too. Ponoko offers dozens of choices, including leather, brass, wood, and felt. Want your item in pink acrylic with your name etched into the side? No problem: Just upload the text and tick a few boxes on Ponoko's website, and you will have it by the end of next week. Ponoko gets paid based on the cost of the materials plus $2 for every minute the laser cutter is on. (The standard Bloom Lamp, for instance, uses a $15 sheet of plywood and 13.2 minutes of laser cutter time.) Designers who sell their products on the site set their own retail prices.
But an online factory is only half of ten Have's vision. Digital manufacturing, because it replicates objects exactly and because it requires only that someone put the right material into the machine, can be done by anyone, anywhere. In August, ten Have struck a deal with a company called ShopBot, which sells computer-controlled routers that woodworkers use to make doors, signs, and cabinets. So far, woodworking shops in places like Buffalo; Rogers, Arkansas; and Olympia, Washington, have signed on to serve as manufacturers for Ponoko products. And ten Have also has a pending deal with TechShop, a chain of machine shops in Menlo Park, California; Portland, Oregon; and Durham, North Carolina, to do the same. The goal: Instead of buying a mass-market table from Ikea, you can have your own personal design -- or a design that you pick out -- manufactured by somebody in your own town, using local materials.
Innovation experts have used a variety of buzzwords to describe this business model -- there's distributed manufacturing, mass customization, and mass individualization -- but there's an easier way to describe the phenomenon: New Stuff. "Right now, we're in an intermediate stage where what you can customize is well defined," says Frank Piller, a professor at Germany's RWTH Aachen University who specializes in new business models around customization. "What sets Ponoko apart is that there are no rules about what you can customize."
There's another way Ponoko is different from your average Web start-up: It pays for itself. Indeed, as much as Ponoko is an example of New Age economics, it's also a case in point in how to succeed when your idea is so futuristic as to sound unreasonable. Ten Have's original plan involved raising millions of dollars from venture capitalists before the company got up and running. But venture capitalists don't generally welcome a discussion of macroeconomics in an elevator pitch, and they are not so keen on 50-year plans. So ten Have had to go back to basics, focusing on profits instead of predictions and on turning his community of enthusiasts, onlookers, and would-be makers into one of paying customers.
Back to basics also meant that earlier this year, I found this 34-year-old CEO -- a man who had already started and sold one company -- 7,000 miles from home, sleeping on an air mattress in a rented bedroom and commuting to a rough part of West Oakland, California.
Ponoko's U.S. office, where I met ten Have for the first time early last summer, is a modest affair. Actually, "office" is probably stretching the truth. Ten Have was working in a windowless closet inside a large warehouse. Most of the space was taken up by a laser cutter. The rest of the tiny room was occupied by sheets of plastic and plywood in every imaginable color and thickness and a 7-foot-tall stack of cardboard boxes. The room smelled like burnt plastic from the fumes that are produced when the machine cuts acrylic. "We won't stay in here too long, 'cause it's not terribly healthy for you," ten Have says, ushering me outside the warehouse.
Ten Have had been working there for three months. It was the longest he had been away from his girlfriend of 14 years, and he was clearly ready to go home. There were dark circles under his eyes and his face was pale. He had been putting in 12-hour days cutting and packaging Ponoko orders and had dropped nearly 15 pounds since his arrival. I asked him what the CEO was doing here playing printer technician. He sighed and said, "The question has crossed my mind many times on this trip, but that's the downside of doing something new. You have to prove it yourself. And that means you have to do these grubby jobs."
A week later, when I meet up with him in New Zealand, he seems a changed man -- showered, smiling, and refreshed. "I've got this stranger-in-a-strange-land feeling," he says, with a grin. "Three months is a bloody long time to be away." Ten Have says he feels free when he is in New Zealand, and it's easy to see why. This is a young, wide-open country that takes up slightly more land than the U.K. but has just one-fifteenth its population. The place may be culturally close to the rest of the English-speaking world, but geographically it isn't close to anything at all. A flight to Sydney takes three and a half hours; the three flights I took to get back home to New York took a total of 25.
New Zealand was settled by Europeans at about the same time Americans were moving into the Wild West, and the country maintains a certain pioneer spirit. New Zealand, in addition to being a nation that loves guns, sports, and camping, is one of the least regulated places in the world -- it ranks second only to Singapore on the World Bank's ease-of-doing-business list -- and the rate of entrepreneurship is higher here than in the U.S. While talking with Kiwis, you will sometimes hear the phrase "No. 8 wire," which roughly means, "It's not pretty, but it works." The expression comes from the idea that a New Zealander can make anything with a bit of standard fencing wire.
