At work, creative employees are often stuck under the thumb of middle management. The normal business outline is plan, implement, check the ROI, and revise. However, in a day and age where adaptability in business is necessary for survival, the DIY initiative of punks, geeks and artists also makes good business sense. Large companies like Google used to allow space for this kind innovation, but with their eyes firmly set on quarterly earnings, crowdfunding is offering young entrepreneurs the opportunity to tinker in a way that it was previously impossible without investment. Read on to learn about 5 companies who had time to innovate using crowdfunding as their startup capital.
Around the world Maker’s fairs have been popping up for years, serving as an opportunity for the “freaks and geeks” who love tinkering to show off their creations and share with others what they’ve learnt in the process. Making things is satisfying, but it is also a great way to educate. The premise is simple, if you’ve got an idea, your first step is to start working on it. Make first, then tinker and tinker and tinker some more until you have an innovative new product or concept. This philosophy is very different than the top down approach of most companies.
Good companies encourage their employee’s side projects.
When a company grows as big as ‘the company formerly known as Google,’ the innovation that helped it expand can stall. As Steve Wozniack put it:
Not everybody can be that innovative. A large corporation doesn’t really have a choice. A large corporation turns out they’re protecting their market, making sure you don’t lose your market and your sales. It’s a money machine. Keeping the money machine going is much more important than trying to innovate and come up with something new.
Google’s policies have cut back on the free time they give their engineers. In 2011 Larry Page took over as CEO. It was then the tech giant started shifting focus from innovation to the bottom line. Opportunities to work on your own project needed to be approved by a manager, and managers were given new targets that didn’t allow for ‘playing around.’ When announcing the restructuring of Google into its umbrella company, Alphabet, Page’s letter did not appeal to engineers to maintain the passion and the culture of an earlier Google. Instead he focused on letting investors know that their money was in good hands.
In the past encouraging employees to tinker was a staple of many business models. Since 1948, 3M has provided their employees 15% of their working hours to work on their own initiatives. The Post-it stuck to your computer was developed as a 3M employee’s personal project. Scotch tape too. Google used to give their engineers a whopping 20% of their time to experiment with their own ideas. This policy led to the development of Adsense, Gmail and Google Talk, with Adsense alone accounting for 25% of Google’s market share. Unfortunately changes at Google mean far less time for personal projects.
While the world’s largest companies need to protect market share, tinkering still makes good business sense. Especially if your end goal is innovation. Some of the most inspiring ideas are coming out of university teams, science fair projects and even, the garage. Corporate giants still have the resources to invest in technology but they also must work to the grindstone to maintain their extraordinary profits.
Huge corporations do not prioritize innovation.
The Facebooks and the Googles have had their moment. Rather than being the next innovators, they use their capital to invest in and integrate new technologies. In the current climate, the public have an opportunity to fund the next batch of innovation. Rather than waiting for the larger companies to create transformations from the top down, we have the occasion to support engineers who would otherwise be limited. To demonstrate this, we’ve put together a shortlist of some of successful crowdfunding campaigns that will inspire you to tinker.
Five Crowdfunding Campaigns that changed the World.
Open Bionics
Open Bionics has wowed the world with their open-sourced prosthetic arms. Built using 3D printing technology, the arms are custom made for each recipient. Their Online videos feature amputees giving high fives and shaking hands at conferences with their stylish bionic limbs. Started as a project at the University of Bristol in 2013, Open Bionics gained recognition with a crowdfunding campaign which raised them approx. 45 000 pounds. It was also a great opportunity to market their revolutionary business model that will bring a robotic prosthetic to people who might not have been able to afford them.
After Kickstarter, Open Bionics won 200,000 from Intel’s Wearable campaign, and was selected for the 2015 Disney Accelerator program. While the company had success working with multinational organizations Open Bionics’ CEO Joel Gibbons recognizes the importance of tinkering in innovation:
If someone wants to get involved with something they’re interested in, the best way to do that is just to start doing it…Follow tutorials, start making things, and engage with communities. The more you do that, the better you’ll become and eventually you’ll get lucky like me and find yourself doing what you love for a living!
It sounds like this inspired tinkerer will continue to surprise us with innovative projects.
Oculus Rift
Virtual Reality is at your fingertips and it is ready to revolutionize the way we do almost everything. In March of 2014, Facebook bought Oculus VR for 2 billion dollars – making possible a consumer ready headset that allows users to deeply immerse into virtual worlds. What you may not know is at the root of this exciting product was a 19 year old kid who created Oculus not in a lab, but in his parent’s garage. Palmer Luckey is the poster boy for those who would like to see tinkering become a bigger part of education.
He spent his high school home schooled, using most of his time to learn how to build electronics from scratch. At 15 he started fiddling with game consoles, “modding” them to create devices that created new gaming experiences.
Modding was more interesting than just building things entirely using new technologies,” Luckey told the Smithsonian magazine. “It was this very special type of engineering that required deeply understanding why people had made the decisions they made in designing the hardware.”
In the 1980s and 1990s Virtual Reality was a hot topic as labs and hackers all over the U.S. tried to simulate real life experiences with little success. At the time, the existing technology did not allow engineers an opportunity to to create what was in their imagination and by the mid-90s most people had left the projects behind.
15 years later Palmer Luckey decided he wanted a more immersive gaming experience. He purchased some used virtual reality equipment and quickly became disappointed with the technology. But all that game console ‘modding’ came in handy. He put that design thinking to use creating better virtual reality. After developing an Oculus prototype Luckey found a group of partners and with them hosted a crowdfunding campaign that raised $2,437,429. Shortly after the company was acquired by Facebook for an obscene amount of money.
The “Oculus Rift” was released to the public in the first quarter of 2016 and a generation finally had the immersive experience long sought after. For the sake of innovation, we hope Luckey himself is still in a room, designing and tinkering with the best parts money can buy.
Monkeylectric
Not all products will scale on a global level. Some undertakings have the opportunity to transform industries while other exist to inspire people to create their own interesting projects. Monkeylectric falls in to this category. The American company produces designer bike parts that light up your life, or more specifically, your bike wheels. Dan Goldwater founded the company after starting designer bike project while a scientist at MIT Media Lab (a center that seems like a luxury training ground for impressive ideas). The Monkey Light Pro is the company’s most recent project is, a LED light display system programmed to show graphics within your bike’s spinning wheels.
The Monkey Light Pro is mounted onto your bike’s wheel and your images are then sent to the device via wireless. You can choose the images the company includes or ones you’ve designed yourself, giving the product an added bonus of encouraging other creatives to push its design limits. Prior to the success of their most recent crowdfunding campaign (which raised $220,293), earlier prototypes were for exhibits and developers, showing at South by Southwest, Maker Faire and Museums. There are many videos featuring the Monkey Lights online but Mission Bicycle’s ad featuring Obama is our favourite:
The Ocean Cleanup Project
The Ocean Cleanup Project is developing a floating system that uses the ocean’s natural currents to clean up dead zones like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Boyan Slat’s famous Ted Talk, “How the Oceans Can Clean Themselves” now has over 2 300 000 views on Youtube. From the humble beginnings of a high school science project to feasibility testing and a 2 million dollar crowdfunding campaign, The Ocean Clean Up Project came a long way in one year.
In a short time Slat’s idea has become one of the best hopes for cleaning up the ocean. The team developed the device through various stages and revealed a large scale model of their unique system commissioned by the Japanese government for the first quarter of 2016. It will be interesting to look back at these test phases from the prospective launch date of 2020.
The ability to tap into the crowd created the opportunity for a company to solve a big problem. The Ocean Project has shown the world that crowdfunding a non-profit is a sure fire way to speed up the rate by which we can change it for the better. Watch Boyan provide the results of their first feasibility study (this video resulted in the largest ever crowdfunding campaign for a non-profit organization):
Nebia
These shocking photos of California’s drought will concern anyone living on the West Coast of the United States. For the last few years California has seen a staggering reduction in their water supply, prompting limits on the amount of water regular citizens can use.
When faced with grave problems like these, humans make efforts to design change. In a regular market where you need to release the latest model earlier than a design team would like, corners are often cut on design in favor of the “roll out date.” But, when you start from scratch and you the option to experiment, true innovation can take over. Nebia had this opportunity when creating a designer showerhead that reduces water consumption by 70 %.
Carlos Gomez Andonaegui spearheaded the idea in his native Mexico after seeing the excessive water waste at a series of gyms he was managing. He and his father Emilio, an engineer, created the initial product. After teaming up with Philip Winter, operations moved to San Francisco where the engineering team made dozens of prototypes in pursuit of the optimum design. On September 11th of 2015, the company raised $3,126,115 USD from their Kickstarter campaign. Backers included Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Family foundation. Though the money did not come directly from Google or Apple, we have no doubt they know when to fund a good idea. We are just no longer sure they are going to be the ones coming up with them.