{"id":7004,"date":"2018-05-13T08:58:57","date_gmt":"2018-05-13T08:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/?page_id=7004"},"modified":"2018-07-06T11:54:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-06T11:54:00","slug":"institutionalisation-and-informal-innovation-in-south-african-maker-communities","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/issues\/issue-12-makerspaces-and-institutions\/peer-reviewed-papers\/institutionalisation-and-informal-innovation-in-south-african-maker-communities\/","title":{"rendered":"Institutionalisation and informal innovation in South African Maker communities"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Chris Armstrong, Jeremy de Beer, Erika Kraemer-Mbula & Mieka Ellis<\/strong><\/p>\n

Download as PDF<\/a><\/p>\n

Introduction<\/h2>\n

Vocal proponents of the maker movement, notably in the United States, position the movement in largely utopian terms, as an adoption of do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches to innovation, and as a means through which consumers become creators (Make<\/i>,\u00a0n.d; Dougherty, 2012). Through tinkering and learning in hands-on environments, makers are said to be re-appropriating the production ideals of pre-industrial times. Anderson (2012) has declared that the movement represents the \u201cNew Industrial Revolution\u201d. The origins of these narratives lie in the launch of\u00a0Make\u00a0<\/i>magazine in 2005 and in the first Maker Faire a year later, both in the US state of California. Other largely uncritical works are those by Hatch (2014) and\u00a0Doorley\u00a0et al. (2012).<\/p>\n

While there is indisputable value in these US-originated founding narratives of the maker movement, their applicability is far from universal. They skew towards a developed-world, middle-class (even upper-class, in\u00a0some\u00a0contexts) orientation (see Maker Faire, 2014). There is, meanwhile, an emergent body of work that takes a jaundiced view of the narrowness\u00a0(see\u00a0maxigas\u00a0&\u00a0Troxler, 2014;\u00a0Mozorov, 2014) of the founding narratives, and literature that seeks to interrogate the meanings and modalities of making beyond middle-class, developed-country settings. Murray and Hand (2014) analyse the position of making in the Indian \u201cdigital humanities\u201d context by examining, inter alia, the practice known as \u201cjugaad<\/i>\u201d<\/i>, which, they argue, \u201cwhile having similarities to hacking, should be understood in its culturally and historically specific contexts […] rather than being forced into a Western template\u201d (Murray\u00a0&\u00a0Hand, 2014, p. 152).\u00a0Braybrooke\u00a0and Jordan (2017) compare the prevailing Western casting of the maker movement with narratives around making in certain contexts in\u00a0 in Peru, India and China, finding that Western narratives may, inter alia, have the effect of rendering \u201cGlobal South and non-Western perspectives invisible\u201d (Braybrooke\u00a0&\u00a0Jordan, 2017, p. 2). The maker movement in developing-country contexts (India, South America) also receives treatment as a manifestation of \u201cgrassroots innovation\u201d in the Smith et al (2016) volume.<\/p>\n

The research we describe and analyse in this article contributes to the broadening of maker movement narratives, in our case through exploration of the activities and orientations of maker communities in the South African context. In\u00a0South Africa,\u00a0a country of stark disparities of wealth, we find a wide variety of narratives present in the minds of its makers. All the narratives bear traces of the founding US narrative, but in most cases the traces are faint, and in many cases extremely faint. We find in our contact with South African makers a strong sense of the uniqueness of the South African case. In this article we demonstrate and interrogate some of the particularities of the South African case through presentation of data and analysis in respect of two dimensions of the movement: its growing institutionalisation and its adherence to an ethos of informal innovation. Our focus on these two dimensions is grounded in the work of the research collective of which we are part, the Open African Innovation Research (Open AIR) network. Among Open AIR\u2019s core aims is to explore potential tensions between formalising and\u00a0informalising\u00a0trends in respect of innovation, knowledge management, knowledge appropriation, and linked phenomena.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, it is our view that research into the emergent maker movement in African national settings must look closely at the degree to which informal innovation modalities are at home in the evolving South African movement, which is becoming increasingly institutionalised. In this article, we call the innovation and knowledge appropriation practices typical of informal sectors \u201cinformal innovation\u201d. We explore the ways in which informal-innovation modalities\u00a0<\/i>are, at present in South Africa\u2019s maker communities, interacting with the trends\u2014in some respects countervailing, in other respects synergistic\u2014towards increased institutionalisation.<\/p>\n

Our exploration is based on a national scanning exercise we conducted in South Africa in 2016-17, which generated primary data on the management, spatial and activity characteristics of more than 20 maker communities across five of the country\u2019s provinces. The data allow us to identify a range of sustainability themes that warrant further investigation in the South African and other national contexts: stability of funding and revenue model; establishment of niches, reputations and brands; knowledge appropriation and intellectual property (IP); elements and degrees of institutionalisation; robustness of communities of practice; embeddedness in broader networks; orientations towards innovation and enterprise development; and socioeconomic inclusion. Each of these themes is given broad-spectrum treatment in an Open AIR working paper (see De Beer et al., 2017). In this article, we home in on institutionalisation, and its potential implications for informal innovation.<\/p>\n

We consider evidence of institutionalisation as manifested by: (1) formalisation of maker communities\u2019 practices; (2) partnerships between maker communities and formal organisations; and (3) embedding of maker communities in formal organisations. We consider evidence of informal innovation as manifested by: (1) constraint-based innovation; (2) incremental innovation;\u00a0(3) collaborative innovation; (4) informal approaches to knowledge appropriation; and (5) innovation in informal networks\/communities in informal settings, i.e.,\u00a0either physical (e.g., clusters) or virtual (e.g., online) networks\/communities. This analysis illuminates several key characteristics of South Africa\u2019s maker movement, and exemplifies an approach that could also be useful for research into the maker movement in other African contexts, in other developing-world contexts, and in developed-country contexts.<\/p>\n

The next section of our article introduces select literature relevant to institutionalisation and informal innovation in the maker context, and outlines our conceptual framework for interrogating institutionalisation and informal innovation as exhibited by South African maker communities. The third section elaborates\u00a0on\u00a0our data collection methodology for the national scan and how we ordered the collected data. Section four provides our findings in respect of the maker communities\u2019 degrees of institutionalisation and their orientations towards informal innovation. The final section provides our analysis and conclusions in respect of institutionalisation, informal innovation, and related dynamics in the South African maker movement.<\/p>\n

Relevant Literature<\/h2>\n

Making and Institutionalisation<\/h3>\n

The aforementioned founding, US-originated narrative of making is ambiguous in respect of institutionalisation, simultaneously extolling the virtues of non-institutional home-garage-based making and the virtues of nationally-franchised, for-profit, user-fee-based TechShops. The ambiguousness of the founding narrative in respect of institutionalisation is illustrated by the range of iterations, depending on who is writing or talking, that are given the status of \u201cmakerspace\u201d. When a small group of people decides to have weekly maker meetups in someone\u2019s garage, the group may soon start to speak of the garage as a makerspace. At the same time, hackerspaces, FabLabs and TechShops are all also typically awarded makerspace status. As Cavalcanti (2013) points out, the oldest of these labels, \u201chackerspace\u201d, has its origins in software-hacking (and thus for some people should not be conflated with a makerspace, which typically has a pronounced hardware element). The FabLab and TechShop brands, meanwhile, are much more recent. The FabLab (\u201cFabrication Laboratory\u201d) brand originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a FabLab is supposed to be free (or very low-cost) to the user. TechShops, which began in California, are for-profit franchises that have been established in several US cities (Cavalcanti, 2013). Because of its emphasis on free or low-cost use (but with quite clear specifications regarding which equipment should be present), the MIT-conceived (and widely exported, including to South Africa) FabLab model is more institutionalised than the aforementioned garage makerspace but at the same time less institutionalised than the TechShop model with its user-fee-centric approach. The tools typically associated with makerspaces are 3D printers, laser-cutters and CNC (computer numeric control) machines, as well as trade tools such as sewing machines, woodworking tools, and welding equipment (Wang et al., 2015; Lorinc, 2013).<\/p>\n

Making and Informal Innovation in Africa<\/h3>\n

The first African Maker Faire, coordinated by a Ghanaian entity separate from the aforementioned US-based Maker Faire brand, was staged in Ghana\u2019s capital, Accra, in 2009 (Maker Faire Africa,\u00a0n.d.). Four more Maker Faire Africa gatherings followed, in\u00a0Nairobi\u00a0(2010), Cairo (2011), Lagos (2012), and then South Africa\u2019s commercial capital, Johannesburg (2014). The US Maker Faire brand has also found its way to Africa, including two South African appearances: the 2015 Maker Faire Cape Town and the 2016 Mini Maker Faire Cape Town.<\/p>\n

Ekekwe\u00a0(2015) and Yoder (2015) write about how the maker movement in Africa provides an opportunity for growth across the continent, through entrepreneurship and through skills development for problem-solving.\u00a0Hersman\u00a0(2013) discusses the interface between makerspaces and innovation in Africa. Waldman-Brown et al. (2013) posit that Ghana\u2019s informal-sector innovators can benefit, and avoid stagnation, through linkages with formal governmental and NGO actors, and, accordingly, Waldman-Brown et al. (2014) find that Ghana\u2019s\u00a0FabLabs\u00a0and makerspaces, as relatively formalised technological workshops, need to build strong linkages with informal-sector artisans\u2019 workshops.<\/p>\n

Valuable existing research into innovation dynamics in Africa\u2019s informal sectors is present in\u00a0Ndemo\u00a0and Weiss (2017), De Beer et al. (2014, 2016), De Beer and Armstrong (2015), De Beer and\u00a0Wunsch-Vincent (2016), De Beer et al. (2016), Kraemer-Mbula\u00a0(2016), and Kraemer-Mbula\u00a0and\u00a0Wunsch-Vincent (2016). In addition, the Open AIR network is actively researching and writing about Africa\u2019s maker movement, via ongoing research in Ghana, Egypt and Kenya as well as developed-developing country comparisons via companion research in Canada. Open AIR has produced two Working Papers on the South African maker movement, the first an in-depth look at maker communities in Gauteng Province (Kraemer-Mbula\u00a0&\u00a0Armstrong, 2017), the second outlining results from the 2016-17 national scan that produced the data for this article\u00a0(De Beer at al., 2017). Open AIR\u2019s\u00a0work has led to a conceptualisation of the maker movement as cutting across its thematic research areas of\u00a0informal-sector innovation<\/i>,\u00a0high technology hubs<\/i>, and\u00a0indigenous and local entrepreneurs<\/i>, and thus providing fertile ground for exploring dimensions of institutionalisation and formality\/informality (Open AIR,\u00a0n.d.).<\/p>\n

Making, in our view, has the potential to focus and channel some of the abundant informal-sector innovation on the continent towards 3D-printing, CNC-machining and other digitally-enabled hardware. Moreover, as its name suggests, the Open AIR network has an interest not only in innovation generally but also, more particularly, in modes of innovation oriented towards openness and open collaboration among groups of innovators. We find that the work of Von Hippel (2005, 2016) and\u00a0Benkler\u00a0(2006), while grounded in developed-world experience, is relevant to African maker contexts, through its emphasis on user innovation (Von Hippel, 2005). User innovators exist in a dynamic ecosystem of peer production (Benkler, 2006) characterised by open collaborative innovation (Baldwin\u00a0&\u00a0Von Hippel, 2011). This kind of open innovation is, however, not to be confused with an alternative conception in which the\u00a0firm\u00a0<\/i>is open to licensing intellectual property (IP) with others (see\u00a0Chesbrough, 2006). The sort of open innovation we see as associated with African makers typically has little to do with formalised IP concerns, and is akin to what Von Hippel (2016) has recently labeled \u201cfree\u201d innovation.<\/p>\n

Institutionalisation Modalities<\/h3>\n

In framing the notion of institutionalisation, we were guided to a great extent by the conceptualisation implied by the Journal of Peer Production (JoPP)<\/em> call for submissions on \u201cInstitutionalisation of Shared Machine Shops\u201d, as follows:<\/p>\n

The dilemmas of institutionalisation (regarding both the\u202fformalization<\/em>\u202fof practices and the fact that many practice-based spaces are now being\u202fembedded<\/em>\u202fwithin larger organizations like museums, municipalities and businesses) provide us with an opportunity to critically examine networks, spaces and futures that may be assembling in this new phase. (JoPP<\/em>, 2017, italics in original)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In line with this JoPP conceptualisation, two elements of institutionalisation that we consider in the data analysis for this article are: formalisation of maker communities\u2019 practices and embedding of maker communities in formal organisations. Additionally, due to evidence from the national scan of a large and growing number of collaborations and funding relationships between the South African maker communities and formal entities, we include an additional conceptualisation of institutionalisation: maker communities\u2019 partnerships with formal organisations (such as universities, government\/state entities, private-sector entities, non-profits). In sum, the three institutionalisation modalities we focus on are:<\/p>\n