Reading Reflection No. 2

For this reflection, I read the book Makers by Chris Anderson. 

1. The general theme of this book was involving the supposed Third Industrial Revolution. This is to say that in the last two decades, the whole method of inventing and getting products to the market has changed significantly. One of the themes that I noticed kept getting brought up was the argument of “bits” versus “atoms.” This whole thing was that the bits were referring to digitized pieces of information, while the atoms are actual products that are in the real world. Anderson kept circling back around to the fact that while the whole inventing and selling started with atoms, with physical products being made by the hands of a small scale inventor, and then progressed to bits, and is coming back around to become a mix of the two. Anderson illustrates the point again and again that production has gone from top-down production by big industrial companies and then sold, to now being more along the lines of bottom-up production by the common person and distribution on the internet. The overarching theme that I got from this book over and over again was centering around the topic that the world today has changed people from inventors to entrepreneurs many times over and most of that is due to the internet. 
2. Immediately I was entertained with how well this book connects to this course. The author had several places in the book where he would write out a series of steps or questions for processes involving entrepreneurship, and I found these little lists to be almost identical to some of the instructions about how to conduct some of the earlier assignments in this class. What immediately comes to mind was the process of interviewing potential customers and figuring out what needs should be addressed. This book I guess made me think more about where and how ideas start out, and the more technical aspects of how they can progress. The author of this book I feel did a very good job about combining just enough facts and company/product names for someone like me who’s not super versed in the world of technical companies to still recognize some and grasp how they came into being and the entire experience behind them. 
3. If I had to design an exercise for this class based on the book , I think I would probably make it similar to Anderson’s own experience with revamping the sprinkler. I would have them take an invention that was patented sometime in the 1960’s and then go about redesigning whatever was made, but use the internet and all other technological avenues open to them to see how different the process of getting a product to the market would be now as opposed to when the patent was originally obtained. Through reading the whole book, I just kept coming back to how he redesigned his grandfather’s life’s work and how differently it went purely because of the involvement of today’s technology. 
4. I feel like my biggest ‘aha’ moment wasn’t exactly a realization per se, but rather all the evidence to back up a point. When Anderson just kept coming back around to his whole “this is the future and where we are now is a place or productivity by everyday average people,” that really stuck with me. I guess for me I’d heard about people creating huge companies out of their dorm rooms and things like that, but I never really pictured that as real for some reason because I’d never personally come into contact with it. So for me, Makers made me really see that it is possible and almost common even for just your average Joe to have the same potential to create and distribute something amazing as a person that has already accomplished what many would view as the impossible.