Making nothing or something: corporate Fab Labs seen through their objects as they cross organizational boundaries

As large firms pursue their quest to support NPD and fuzzy front-end activities within their organizations, some have recently opted to create “corporate Fab Labs”. These spaces, which regroup an innovation-oriented community and provide any employee with a physical setting and open access to digita...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fuller, Matthew, David, Albert
Other Authors: Dauphine Recherches en Management (DRM), Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
Format: Conference Object
Language:English
Published: HAL CCSD 2017
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01629696
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01629696/document
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01629696/file/53542.pdf
Description
Summary:As large firms pursue their quest to support NPD and fuzzy front-end activities within their organizations, some have recently opted to create “corporate Fab Labs”. These spaces, which regroup an innovation-oriented community and provide any employee with a physical setting and open access to digital fabrication tools are also the birthplace of objects. A lingering and recurring question among practitioners and decision makers is: what do these objects represent? In terms of innovation, are they something, or nothing?This paper is an initial response to these reactions and develops a theoretical and empirical study of objects made in corporate Fab Labs. Building upon empirical data collected from a series of photos, we contribute a rudimentary tool for identifying the maturity of corporate Fab Labs as their objects cross three organizational knowledge boundaries: syntax, semantic, and pragmatic.