Impact and Potential of collaborative Internet and additive manufacturing technologies

You can follow the webstream here

The Internet is allowing virtual communities to easily co-create digital assets and intellectual content at a very low “cooperation cost”. The ideology behind the open-source software development methodology has actually spread to new domains such as open-data, open-design and open-innovation. A new set of Internet tools and services is now available to leverage the “wealth and the wisdom of the crowd”. Complex projects can be crowd-sourced and crowd-funded by small and medium sized companies to reduce their cost of doing business. The “crowd” itself uses and modifies “open-data” to “co-create” new open-designs for the purpose of participating to “crowd-sourced” projects.

On the other hand, additive manufacturing technologies are breaking through. Thanks to the rapid advances in 3D printing, 3D Scanning, Robotic and technologies such as Contour Crafting for building construction, it now starts to be possible to build, from digital data, cheaper objects (large or small) using much less material than if manufactured traditionally using subtractive manufacturing industrial technologies. New object designs are possible that possess innovative physical properties impossible to obtain otherwise. If 3D printing technology continues to develop, it will be possible to 3D print some objects “just in time” and “locally” using “digital designs’ co-created by many users, and downloaded (legally or illegally) from the Internet.  Labour, transport, storage costs might be dramatically reduced, hence further contributing to the potential emergence of a “new industrial” era.  

On the payment side, the development of the use of crypto-money such as Bitcoin might dis-intermediate banks, credit-card companies and other central players in the payment business, making financial traceability, and identity tracking harder to achieve for law enforcement and fiscal purpose.

The long term combination of all these technologies may revolutionise the industry and the global economy given the potential productivity gains that may result from it. The workshop is part of a study to analyse what could be the combined and long-term effect (10 years) of these technologies on the global economy and on the manufacturing and services industry in particular, and to propose policy options to address the challenges identified and to leverage the corresponding opportunities.

Collaborative economy on facebook Google Plus Twitter

Programme

• 14:00 - 14:05 Welcome by Virginie Rozière, MEP, STOA Panel Member
• 14:05 - 14:10 Angele Giuliano, AcrossLimits, Malta

                                Overview of workshop and technologies addressed

• 14:10 - 14:25 Frank T. Piller, Aachen University & MIT Smart Customisation Group, USA     

                                Co-creation and Crowdsourcing with Users and Consumers for Innovation

• 14:25 - 14:40 Oliver Gajda, European Crowdfunding Network, Brussels

                                Crowdfunding and Open Source Economy

• 14:40 - 14:55 Yi-Ke Guo, Imperial College London, UK

                                Big Data for Better Innovation

• 14:55 - 15:10 Thomas Heath, Open Data Institute, UK

                                Open Data: a driver for economic, social and environmental value

• 15:10 - 15:30 Coffee Break

• 15:30 - 15:45 Louis Turner, Asia Pacific Technology Network, UK & Asia

                                Additive Manufacturing – Transforming EU and Global Industry

• 15:45 - 16:00 Beverley Vaughan MD, Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst, UK

                                3D-Bioprinting: Transforming Medicine, Research and the Healthcare Industry

• 16:00 - 16:15 Peter Van Valkenburg, Coin Center, USA 

                               Crypto-currencies for policy makers

• 16:15 - 16:30 Elli Androulaki, IBM Zurich, Switzerland

                                Privacy and security of crypto-currency transactions and payment systems

• 16:30 - 17:15 Debate and round table discussion
• 17:15 - 17:30 Conclusions and closure by Virginie Rozière