The Re-Emergence of DIY vs. Big Organizations by Johnny Lee

Today we have a special guest post The Re-Emergence of DIY vs Big Organizations by Johnny Lee. The post is here on MAKE in its entirety with permission. It’s an excellent read for makers, innovators, and any company looking to harness the smarts of the tinkerers out there. Johnny Lee is best known for his Wiimote hacking, which sparked thousands of projects. And most recently, I worked with him (and Ladyada) on the Kinect hack + bounty. He recently left Microsoft Research and is now at Google.

I have actually put quite a bit of thought toward this topic having recently jumped back and forth between the DIY hobby culture, serious academic research, and massively funded commercial product development. I’ve had the fortune to observe people trying to make new and interesting things at extremely different scales — from $100 budgets to $100,000,000 budgets.

One thing that I find very consistent: good ideas come from anywhere. The biggest factor in predicting where good work will come from is “how much does this person actually care about what they are working on?” In fact, big budgets and a sense of entitlement can actually hinder the emergence of interesting ideas. Having the expectation to do really great work can lead people or organizations to develop tunnel vision on “big” ideas, and miss out on smaller ideas that end up having a lot of impact or dismiss seemingly silly approaches that actually end up working.

There’s a really great TEDx talk by Simon Sinek that touches on this. He actually brings up a number of great points in his talk, but the one I want to highlight here is his anecdote about Samuel Pierpont Langley vs. the Wright Brothers in pursuit of powered flight. Langley represented the exceptionally well-funded professional research organization, and the Wright Brothers were the scrappy passionate pair of DIYers. Today, we now know the Wright brothers as the ones who created the first airplane, and most have never heard of Langley. Big investment is not a very strong predictor of valuable output. But an individual’s willingness to continue working on the same problem with very little to no pay is a good predictor.

The great thing about the hacker community is that, generally, most of them fall into the latter category. Independent developers and hobbyists care enough to spend their own money to work on the projects they believe in. As a result, I’m finding that the delta in the quality of ideas from a well-funded research group and the independent community (in aggregate) is getting smaller and smaller by the month. Increasingly, the best “hobby projects” surpass the quality level of “true research” work in the same area. This startling lack of contrast (or sometimes inversion) becomes laughably evident when I am reviewing academic/scientific work submitted for publication on a project that uses Kinect, and then the newest Kinect hack pops up on Engadget that simply beats it hands down.

Now, I could simply make a curmudgeonly claim that the quality of professional/research/academic work has gone down. But, I actually don’t think that’s true. In my opinion, what is happening is that the quality of independent projects are getting better — fast — which, I think, resonates with this observation of a “DIY Revolution.”

But, why is this re-emergence happening now? Wasn’t is just a few years ago people were lamenting about how “black boxed” consumer products had gotten, and that the good old days where you could open up a product and futz with the innards in a meaningful way were gone? What’s changed to cause this apparent rebirth?

I have a theory.

My Theory About the Re-Emergence of the DIY Community:
In the 90s and early 2000s, Moore’s law was absolute king. The primary deciding factor in purchasing an electronic product was simply how fast it was. This meant an intense focus on tighter and tighter integration of components and all the functionality was disappearing into tiny little black chips that could not be accessed nor modified by mere mortals. But now, people barely talk about raw “megahertz” or “megabytes” anymore. General purpose computers have gotten “fast enough.” We now want specialized kinds of computers: one that fits in our pocket, plays games in 3D, one shaped like a tablet, one that goes in our car, one that can go underwater, or get strapped your snowboard and not break. We have reached a surplus in computing power that makes it affordable to build (and buy) devices for smaller and smaller needs. Our imagination for what to do with computing has simply not kept up with Moore’s Law. So, we find more uses for more modest amounts of computing power. But, what does this have to do with the DIY community?

A byproduct of having such an immense surplus in computing is that the tools you can buy within a hobbyist budget have also gotten exponentially better in just the past 3-4 years, while the improvements in professional tools have been more modest. The difference in capability between the electronics workbench of a professional engineer and a hobby engineer is getting really, really small. Kinect is an overwhelming example of this. The cost of a high quality depth camera dropped nearly two orders of magnitude overnight. As a result, hobbyists are out-pacing many professionals in the same domain simply due to sheer parallelism. Perhaps not as dramatically, but this is happening with nearly all genres of electronic and scientific equipment. One day, maybe we’ll see backyard DIY electron beam drilling for nano-machining.

When it is no longer about who has the most resources, it’s about who has the best ideas. Then, it becomes a pure numbers game:

Take 10,000 professional engineers vs. 1 million hobbyists with roughly equivalent tools. Which group will make progress faster? Now, consider that you have to pay the 10,000 engineers $100K/year to motivate them to work, and the 1 million hobbyists are working for the love of it. Does that change your answer? Even if it doesn’t, you have to concede that there does exist a ratio that will make the output of these two groups equal. It’s merely a matter of time.

If you follow me through this argument, which I won’t claim to be bulletproof but which does explains the trends we are observing quite nicely, then this has an interesting implication on organizations that are currently funding big research groups. When it’s simply a matter of who has the best ideas, it’s tough to try to employ enough people to get good coverage. You could try to spend a lot of energy on trying to find the “best” people, but that’s about as challenging as predicting the stock market. Some inventors simply go “dry” of good ideas and end up not providing a good lifetime return on investment (I fully expect this to happen to me someday — I just hope it happens later rather than sooner).

So to me, this suggest three options for big exploratory organizations:

  1. Start tackling more resource-intensive problems: things that fundamentally cannot be done today for a few thousand dollars, but at some basic level require materials, tools, energy, computation, space, manpower that are impossible to obtain at a hobby level. The LHC and space programs are good examples of this. Even if the end goal may be of debatable near-term economic value, there is a high probability that unexpected derivative technologies/projects will bring commercial/educational benefits elsewhere.
  2. Empower everyone within your organization to do exploratory work. The tools are cheap and “research groups” have no monopoly on good ideas. It’s hard to know where lightning will strike, so make sure you encourage it anywhere and hope you haven’t missed a spot.
  3. Partner with the outside developer community. There is plenty of precedence, where using the resources you have to channel the creative power of the masses through the platforms you control can bring a tremendous amount of value, if done in an organized manner. It’s the rocket fuel that powers companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon to go from non-existence to dominating entities in less than three years. The same can absolutely happen with traditional physical electronics and other consumer goods. It simply requires treating your customers as potential partners, rather than assuming they are all potential predators.

14 thoughts on “The Re-Emergence of DIY vs. Big Organizations by Johnny Lee

  1. johngineer says:

    The only thing I would add to Johnny’s wonderful article is that, beyond just empowering outside work among your employees, you make outside work a priority in your hiring and recruitment policies.

    Further, I would love to see large companies encouraging employees to join and/or form hackerspaces.

    During the DIY computer era of the late ’70’s and early 80’s, my dad recalls a homebrew computer club at Bell Laboratories. The club met in an unused lab on the Bell Labs campus and their work was encouraged by their supervisors. I see absolutely no reason why something like this couldn’t continue in the present day.

    1. Anonymous says:

      I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with suggesting companies should encourage employees to join/form hackerspaces. The potential synergy gains would be vast, and also positive for both the employer and employee – quite probably leading to innovations benefiting us us all.
      I believe the hacker culture can teach the business world a thing or two about creativity, thinking outside of the box, etc.

  2. Anonymous says:

    On academia vs. DIY hacking– it’s kind of an arbitrary distinction, isn’t it?
    Your average grad student isn’t being paid much, and often is getting buy with fewer resources than a good hackerspace.

    1. James F. Kelly says:

      One thing that most students (both undergrad and grad) should strive to find out is whether their school will come out owning their work should it grow in popularity or find a mainstream audience. I believe this is one of the things the Arduino team did right… they left the university they were associated with because of their suspicions about commercialization of their work.

      1. Miguel says:

        Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the university I attended, has a detailed intellectual property policy and I’m sure many other universities have the same. I’m not sure if the Arduino project would have fallen under any of these parameters if they made the arduino under university setings. Here’s an excerpt from the policy regarding patents and the link below.
        B. Patents.4.a.
        The student is not paid for the work that results in the creation and does not receive significant University resources in support of the work. In these circumstances, the student owns the intellectual property interests in the creation. This is true even if the intellectual property is created to fulfill course requirements or other academic requirements. Nonetheless, by enrolling at the University, the student grants the University a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to mark on, modify, publicize and retain the work as may be required by the faculty, department or the University. The University is not entitled to an equity share in any ownership profits, except in the circumstances covered below.
        The whole policy can be reached here.
        http://www.calpoly.edu/~rgp/policyIP.html

  3. Mark Coleran says:

    One thing missed in the solutions that could be valid in all places…

    Get the people involved to care about what they are doing or do things they care about.

    There is no shortage of great people in academia or corporate but the cultures of production over value, whether papers or products can stymie even the most passionate.

  4. Benjamin Gatti says:

    Three companies: HP, Apple and Google, are garage start-ups solve popular – but trivial problems:
    Search? – a tiny problem anyone with an Access db could kick around.
    a Mouse? – toy idea at Xerox – already obsolete.
    VCO? – pretty trivial.

    Facebook, Twitter, & Groupon takes the argument to the sublime; between them, there isn’t any there, there.

    The World is full of pressing challenges: Energy, Fresh water, Sanitation, Minimal Medical care, Female Literacy and equality – some of which require new ideas at scale – 

    My question is – has risk capitol neglected the bigger problems facing humanity – in favor of that class of inane challenges which can be solved in your average mother’s basement?

    Nuclear Power/Green energy is stalled – but Angry birds is reactive,
    High Speed Trains have quietly left the cover of Popular Mechanics  – but OMG RU 4 Real! rulz.
    NASA is mothballed – but I can get 1/2 off a pedicure with 50 neighbors – woot.

    Should society offer the same capital gains relief for chasing indolent clicks as it does for solving the substantial problems of our time?

Comments are closed.

Discuss this article with the rest of the community on our Discord server!
Tagged

current: @adafruit - previous: MAKE, popular science, hackaday, engadget, fallon, braincraft ... howtoons, 2600...

View more articles by Phillip Torrone

ADVERTISEMENT

Maker Faire Bay Area 2023 - Mare Island, CA

Escape to an island of imagination + innovation as Maker Faire Bay Area returns for its 15th iteration!

Buy Tickets today! SAVE 15% and lock-in your preferred date(s).

FEEDBACK