Author Archives: Wenbin_luo

Due to the I get from the Open & User Innovation course, I got a lot of passion about finding innovation stuff. Wahen I went back to China during this Christmas, I went to Shenzhen, the most dynamic and innovative city of China. Fortunately, I have a lot of chance to get close to the new innovation environments. SZOIL is one of them.

 

SZOIL refers to Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, established by SIDA(Shenzhen Industrial Design Association) and Maker Collider, is a space and platform for worldwide makers to communicate and cooperate. SZOIL is also the first Fab Lab in Shenzhen authorized by MIT CBA as a research and development partner of FabLab 2.0. SZOIL embodies four functions including Fab Lab promotion and FabLab 2.0 research and development, innovation and entrepreneur education courses for makers, global maker service platform, and industry chain collaboration service. The lab dedicates in exploring the issues and developing solutions to connect the massive production ecosystem to small hardware startups so as to promote the international standing of Shenzhen in the development of digital intelligent hardware and manufacturing and build a future intelligent hardware Silicon Valley by combining new open source method and current manufacturing system in Shenzhen.

They do four kinds of things. First is Fab Lab establishment and solution, second is innovation and entrepreneur education courses, third is global maker service platform and the last is industrial chain collaboration service.

So what is Fab Lab? Fab Lab, advocated by MIT CBA, is a low-cost laboratory for people to make whatever they want by applying digital and simulation tools in it. In June 2015, SZOIL formally signed an agreement with MIT CBA, which became the first Fab Lab in Shenzhen jointly developed with CBA. In Fab 12 held in August 2016, Fab Foundation and SZOIL jointly displayed FabLab 2.0.

 

SZOIL provides the makers with standard digital manufacturing environment and innovation courses according to the needs of clients and links with the global Fab Lab network, and it designs the blueprint for the maker space in the aspects of space planning, standard equipment, innovation course, etc.

 

Open innovation is the future of innovation, building open labs to the world makes a great benefit not only to the creaters but also for all the people who use their product.  It can reduce cost of conducting research and development. At the same time, make potential for improvement in development productivity and incorporation of customers early in the development process. Open innovation also increase in accuracy for market research and customer targeting, has a potential for synergism between internal and external innovations. I believe that both China and Sweden would benefit a lot of their openness to innovations.

 

In Stockholm, there are also quite amout of open labs.

kth open lab: https://www.kth.se/en/samverkan/arenor/open-lab-1.523140

oepnlab: http://openlabsthlm.se/

 

 

 

One thing that Open & User Innovation takes to me so far is that I am getting passionate about evreything on innovation. With this enthusitastic in November 19th, I went to Uppsala to take part in an innovation community event called Uppstart which is a tech startup conference, held in Uppsala Castle once a year. Uppsala is a beautify city with rich history. This old city is now a big node of Innovation in Sweden and from where hundreds of IT start-ups origined. During the event, many tecnical start-ups would come and show their innovations.

There are many start-up companys on exhibition this time. Their booth located on the stairs of the castle. Everyone there is friendly and smart and passionate about innovation. The first start-up company called 46elks. It basicly offers an API for customers to add custom telephony features that are prfectly suited to the way they want to do. For example, using its product, which is the API. Is you are owner of a restuarant and you feel uncovenient managing your employees working schedule, you can customize a special SMS or phone call interaction with your employees cellphone number. So that they can easily send a email to a number you have set before, and then the number send back their schedule people by people. Every employee, with network or without, could know their arrangement easily. I was pretty impressed by this idea. It is just what I learned from this course, open and user innovation. The company do the negociation with telecom operators, so they got the right to send SMS in a low price. Then they open their platform to the users to let users innovate. One thing I remember Serdar taught me is that letting users themselves innovate to solve their problems is more workable and efficient. 46elks opens a simple way to the users and users can achieve so many goals. Except the restuarnt time arrangement, they could using the SMS to increase the safety of payment, they could using the API to redirect their incoming phonecalls when they are at office and do not want to be interrupted. Anyway, 46elks could solve many problems by offering API and platform to the users and let user innovate themselves which makes me have a better understanding of this course.

After listening several start-up’s introduction. I took a seat at the main hall and listened the conference talking about the future technology. Several topics were discussed, including cashless world, Uber’s strategy and VR in the future. I saw an upcoming world which is open and full of innovations. Some diferences between now and future is that every user in the future could take part in the wave of creating innvation and good stuff. Sweden is really a great place to start up an technology company.

While I have to say that I learned a lot in this event. The world is becoming more and more open. Everyone could be the part of innovations. I would really appericiate the thing I learned from ME1033 Open&User Innovation. I could not have a better understanding of open and user innovation in this course. I will pay more attention on the open world. Not only in information technology part, but innovation should not be ignored in every area in our life. Like learning, cooking or sporting. We should spread out our creativity and it is impossible for the person not to succssed in his/her life. Let’s hug the open world!!

If you want to get more info, the link is http://uppstart.com/.