Fab Lab brings MIT tech transfer ideas to Wisconsin businesses

I love the Fab Lab

Fab Lab brings MIT tech transfer ideas to Wisconsin businesses
Joe Vanden Plas
July 30, 2008

Appleton, Wis. - Fabrication Laboratories, or Fab Labs, are an exercise in
global technology sharing spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, and a Wisconsin technical college is putting an entrepreneurial
spin on them.

It's that entrepreneurial piece that has MIT's Sherry Lassiter visiting Fox
Valley Technical College to learn more about the “Take it to Market”
business model of FVTC's Fab Lab, and to get ideas for expanding other Fab
Labs, now used in educational settings, to accommodate inventors that want
to commercialize their ideas.

In northeastern Wisconsin, dozens of inventors are using the lab and taking
advantage of the mentoring services of a team of engineers with the hope of
translating their ideas into business. The FVTC facility is the first of 30
global Fab Labs to have a special focus on entrepreneurs and developing
businesses, and MIT has taken notice.

Fab Labs, a program of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, are predicated on
the idea that ordinary people can apply industrial-grade fabrication and
electronics tools and stimulate innovation with virtual reality,
simulation, modeling and rapid prototyping. In Appleton, Lassiter plans to
explore the possibilities of Fab Lab business development.

“I'm out here to see their model and to see if we can understand ways that
this might propagate throughout the rest of the [Fab Lab] network,” said
Lassiter, program manager of the Center for Bits and Atoms.

Digital Fabrication

There are several business drivers for the FVTC Fab Lab, including the
desire to help more of the intellectual property developed in the state
stay here. To augment the lab for entrepreneurs, the FVTC Venture Center
has created different packages of business services.

Amy Pietsch, director of the venture center, has visions of a Fab Lab at
every technical college in Wisconsin. FVTC already has established a
Midwest Fab Lab Network with the Ohio-based Lorraine County Community
College and Century College in Minnesota, and has partnered with the
University of Wisconsin-Stout, a polytechnic university with research
projects in nanotechnology and genomics. FVTC's strongest relationship is
with a Fab Lab in Norway, whose director and staff visited Appleton last
August.

Existing businesses also rely on the lab. Motion Products in Neenah, for
example, restores rare European sports cars and is using the lab as its R&D
facility.

“I think we're discovering that the Fab Lab is just a powerful, integrating
mechanism,” said Jim Janisse, director of the lab. “We now have
relationships with Fab Labs around the world, and we're already seeing
exchanges of products and ideas.”

Radical innovation

While its focus is on affordable, early-stage prototyping, Pietsch said the
FVTC lab is not competing with businesses that offer prototyping services
to established companies. In addition to taking inventors through the new
product development process, Pietsch hopes the lab will drive “not just
incremental innovation, but radical innovation.”

Lassiter believes access to Fab Labs, which she called a means to create
and innovate, is going to change the way people think about business and
intellectual property. The idea behind Fab Labs, she noted, is to
democratize intellectual property.

“I think Fox Valley and MIT are sitting on threshold of a new era,” she
said, “and I think it's going to very exciting.”