A pretty cryptic title, I agree.
Too often we delve into a world of insider codes using of three letter acronyms without thinking about our audience. In this case “HIW” is Hardware Innovation Workshop, the conference I co-chaired with Dale Dougherty at Xerox PARC back in May. The “CTO” stands for Chief Technology Officer which is often the senior technology title in a company. What the title refers to is my having delivered an ultra-condensed summary of the HIW to the Washington Area CTO Roundtable.
The Maker Movement has the potential to be important to a business and given my history I feel compelled to share the news. In this case, I presented the primary forces behind the movement: open source hardware, collaborative design and new rapid prototyping tools. I then put these forces into context by telling the story of three organizations which have harnessed the movement to strategic advantage: Ford, DARPA and GE.
It seemed to be well received but just when I thought I had finished I was asked by Alan Harbitter if there was some news I wanted to share about a makerspace in Reston. He has a wonderful way of steering the meeting through timely questions and of course he was right. It was Alan who knew of Nova Labs and HIW and it was he who had invited me to speak. Of course I was happy to tell the story of the makerspace which I co-founded.
Again while I was winding up a second unforeseen prompt came. This one came from Yuvi Kochar who officiates these meetings. Out of the blue he asked how may people wanted to get a tour of Nova Labs. My delight turned to amazement as 80% of the hands went up in the air. All this occurred just 10 minutes before I hopped into my car to start a cross-country drive; guess it’ll have some follow-up when I return in October.
I’m looking forward to showing off what a makerspace is made of.
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