Distributed Market Substitution

A condition whereby full open-sourcing of a product and its enterprise infrastructure results in substitution of centralized, proprietary production with distributed, open source, flexible, small enterprise.

The idea is to distribute wealth more equitably by enabling thousands of producers to bring small enterprise back to communities. This can happen for most of light manufacturing, as well as a significant fraction of the primary sector + heavy industry. OSE is working on demonstrating this feasibility. Light manufacturing can happen in open source microfactories in communities.

The idea is that as barriers to entry are lowered, and product design is designed-for-flexible-fabrication in open source microfactories. To lower entry barriers, productization and marketing capacity is developed to assist in distributed production. If these capacities are developed, then a 1000x or more wider production of the specific good can occur. The logic behind this is that the most robust production is local production, as it creates unjobs in a decentralized + distributed scenario. The incentive behind this is enterprise startup in communities. This can happen as open design becomes available - as open source microfactory technology becomes available - and barriers to entry are lowered - such that the value chain shifts to efficiency (no competitive waste, no transportation, local and recycled materials). It is theorized here that global supply chains cannot compete with truly efficient local production because local production enables improved lifecycle stewardship.

Examples

• Global supply chain of shoes ($300B market) can be substituted by 300,000 local brands worldwide producing 3D printed shoes, each running a $1M/year operation.