Bullish: What’s driving the maker movement

The maker movement is hot. Worldwide, there are about 2,000 maker spaces and 26 percent of cities in the U.S. have them. I sat down with Inventables CEO Zach Kaplan to learn about what’s driving the movement and where it’s headed.

“I think it’s a bunch of things,” Kaplan said. “One, access to all these technologies is getting super cheap. It used to be you had to spend thousands on software and thousands on hardware.”

The culture is also really starting to come to life because the Internet makes it super easy to learn about building things yourself via sites like YouTube and Instructables, Kaplan said.

“I think of the maker movement as sort of the educational piece of digital manufacturing,” Kaplan said. “What’s happening is traditional factories are really good for high volume production. But these indy manufacturing businesses are good for serving niches and we’re just going to see an explosion of these really cool niche products that are made by indy manufacturers on demand because they don’t have to hold inventory and they don’t have to make an investment.”

Be sure to watch the full episode to learn more about the maker movement.