Community Supported Manufacturing
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Community supported manufacturing (CSM) is a business model where a production facility - a digital fabrication facility - is co-funded by a large number of individuals interested in a certain product. In this model, product development costs are covered by a collaborative, open source product development process. This development process produces documentation of fabrication procedure, and continues up to creating access to digital design files for Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) using the above digital fabrication facility.
The resulting enterprise is executed as a small microfactory (4000 sf production modules) that can produce a wide range of goods and services, as 1 is a bad number in business. Such a facility competes effectively with global supply chains for market share, by leveraging the value of circular economies and local supply chains.
The Open Source Microfactory-based CSM operation is intended to realize the promise of global collaborative design and local production (leveraging digital fabrication) as promised initially in Fab.
External Work
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- Good background theory on CSM - [1]