Shenzhen

The maker movement

From a fishing village to the biggest manufacturer of gadgets in the world, Shenzhen has radically changed in half a century. A Chinese region which once had less than 300.000 inhabitants, today has millions. It is said that this city could have over 20 million inhabitants, but that is something difficult to estimate due to the high number of commuters. Indeed Shenzhen is incessantly growing; driven by its buoyant economy, the city is becoming one of the main business centres in China.

Its fast-paced environment is characteristic of Shenzhen. Indeed, this is evidenced in the velocity in which new products can be not just manufactured but also created and launched to the market in this region. Because Shenzhen is no longer just a poor manufacturing city, it is becoming a place for innovators. That being so, “The maker movement” is the best example of what can be done by its unquenchable work force. Employees at manufacturing factories have learnt a lot from churning out gadgets for notorious brands. And although at first they had just been using that knowledge to produce cheaper copies of these gadgets, it did not take long for them to realise what they were capable of. Today, numerous inventions are launched every month in Shenzhen, a city driven by incessant “makers”.

Using large companies’ creations as the base for their own creation allowed manufacturers to thrive. Because the use of existing products to improve them or come up with new stuff is part of “The makers movement”. However, not everybody welcomed this movement with enthusiasm. Large corporations like Samsung, Apple and so on received it as a threat. If truth be told, these employees are using corporations’ intellectual property for their own benefit, something not allowed in Western countries. Nevertheless, there is nothing to be done to stop these outsiders who are now calling western entrepreneurs attention. Tech corporations know the importance of adaptability in this industry. Fighting against something that seems to be the new tendency is wasting precious time that can be used for adaptation. In fact brands like Apple or Microsoft are embracing the idea of Open Source which allows consumers to be more than users, and to become creators. And at the same time Open Source makes it easier for companies to find new ideas, because these are given directly by their customers.

What started in Shenzhen as a way to survive, producing forgeries could become a point of inflection for the tech industry, in which established brads had to choose between competing or partnering mere individuals thinking outside the box.

I wrote this post based on a very interesting documentary from The Wire. Here is the link: Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware (Full Documentary)