Crowdfunding a new kind of industrial revolution

GameGolf on IndiegogoAcross the world people are beginning to invent new products ranging from games consoles to watches and thermostats, raise finance by asking the public to support their endeavours on crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter, Fundit and IndieGoGo, and are bringing their inventions to market in a totally crowd-sourced way. Are we witnessing the onset of a new industrial revolution?

You could say the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his industrial design sidekick Sir Jony Ive made product design fashionable again, starting with the iMac in the late Nineties and the onset of the iPhone in 2007.

But the current trend to invent (or re-invent) hardware, raise money and bring a product to market via the internet owes a lot to a series of happy coincidences that have more to do with the maturation of e-commerce and the ideas of writers like Thomas Friedman who in his book The World is Flat believes the world is becoming a level playing field in terms of competition and commerce.

I first became aware of IndieGoGo when I spoke to a 10 year-old-boy at a CoderDojo in Dublin…

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