PrefBlog

I am among many people who like to ponder the future of employment amidst all the automation nowadays. Not with any apocalyptic bias – it is self-evident that the cost of everything is, ultimately, a labour cost and therefore labour income – but with what I hope is a less jaundiced eye.

I think we may be entering a new era of craftsmanship, in which we have Big Business producing commodities for the masses and small, internet-enabled businesses taking a more careful and individualistic approach. I may be biased in this, because that’s the business model of Hymas Investment Management Inc., but there’s other evidence we’re heading that way.

Consider craft beer:

But it wasn’t too long ago that American beer drinkers were largely limited to what beer buffs call MillCoorWeiser beer—the mass produced American lager most prominently sold under the Budweiser, Miller, and Coors brand names. In their 2015 article, Economists Kenneth G. Elzinga, Carol Tremblay and Victor J. Tremblay (Elzinga et al.) report that prior to 1970 over 99% of the beer consumed in the U.S. was the traditional lager beer produced by the large domestic breweries. Needless to say, it was a bland time for American beer.

Then in 1965, entrepreneur and innovator Fritz Maytag purchased the failing Anchor Brewing Company, located in San Francisco, and the revival of craft beer was under way. Maytag revived the brewery, and according to Elzinga et al. his operation inspired other entrepreneurs to join him in the craft beer renaissance.

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And in Toronto:

The number of manufacturing firms has increased in recent years. “We attribute the growth to a lot more micro-manufacturing, as well as the ‘maker movement’” of independent inventors, designers and tinkerers, as well as tech hardware companies, says [manager of entrepreneurship services for Toronto] Mr. [Chris] Rickett.

“Part of making sure manufacturing continues to exist is making sure that people know it is this very creative job opportunity. It needs rebranding, and the maker movement is really good at that.”

What’s more, he says, new tech tools are making it a lot easier to open a manufacturing business.

“It used to be if you wanted to make a product, the process of prototyping that and getting it to market was very long,” he explains. “Now you can prototype it down at the library, using their MakerBot [3-D printer], then put that prototype on Kickstarter and presell the product.”

The upshot is that the timelines and barriers to starting a manufacturing company have been drastically reduced.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2016 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.