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How the FirstBuild product co-creation studio is changing how new things are made



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Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and small-batch production for the win

Haje Jan Kamps

19 hours

If you are running R&D at a large appliance manufacturer, you have a challenge.
You typically make products in enormous quantities at pretty slim margins. In order to recoup your development, tooling and launch marketing costs, you need to create and sell a huge number of products. To ensure that that’s possible, you’d probably end up doing a bunch of user and market research to ascertain that you have the highest chance of success with your products.
That makes sense, but the very business model itself means that it’s hard to do something truly risky, which in turn means that mainstream manufacturers rarely come up with anything genuinely innovative.

If there was a mushroom fruiting appliance, would a lot more people regularly be growing mushrooms at home? There was only one way to find out: to build one and to try and sell it.

That’s where FirstBuild comes …

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