Posted on 02/10/2011 6:07:28 AM PST by La Lydia
Daniel Reetz loves trash bins. A big one in Fargo, N.D., was where he found most of the materials he used to build a scanner that was fast enough to scan a 400-page book in about 20 minutes without cracking the binding. The two Canon PowerShot A590 cameras and two lights that he lashed together with a few pieces of acrylic and wood cost him about $300 in all, considerably less than the $10,000 commercial book scanners on the market.
When he was finished, Mr. Reetz, now 29 and working at Disney Research’s laboratories, put his 79-step how-to guide on a Web site. Since the post went up nearly two years ago, about 1,000 people have joined Mr. Reetz’s forum, and about 50 have built their own scanners from castoffs...
Do-it-yourselfers like Mr. Reetz may not know it, but their tinkering is challenging a deeply entrenched tenet of economic theory: that producers, not consumers, are the ones who innovate....
...pathbreaking research by a group of scholars at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, suggests that the traditional division of labor between innovators and customers is breaking down....
What the team discovered...was that the amount of money individual consumers spent making and improving products was more than twice as large as the amount spent by all British firms combined on product research and development..when it comes to scientific instruments 77 percent of the innovations come from users...
As consumer innovators proliferate, the tensions with producers have escalated, and the courts are increasingly going to be called in to adjudicate, Mr. Fisher predicted. He is skeptical that easing intellectual property law would significantly spur economic efficiency, but he does say it would foster creativity and community. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“...pathbreaking research...”
Seems Ms. Cohen is in the spirit of her story, inventing new words. “Pathbreaking” doesn’t make sense, though, strictly speaking...
Apple, Hewlett-Packard and many others were started in garages and on kitchen tables.............
Yes I think this is an attack on patent law as well—and not to the advantage of the little player as the article wants to suggest.
This is interesting, but not news. Little guys have always innovated. And I don’t see a connection to patent politics.
The knowledgeable, motivated and financially able user, of course.
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