The following post “Five ways the Maker Movement can help catalyze a manufacturing renaissance” by Mark Muro and Peter Hirshberg was originally posted on “THE AVENUE” a blog series of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program website on January 4, 2017.

Our collaboration with Brookings is long standing and we continue to share a common perspective on Advanced Industries. Case in point, we’ve also been thinking about the local “Maker Movement” in Fremont. Our recent project with Recast City is summarized in the August 2016 post “Real estate professionals, civic leaders, and makers convene to learn about small-scale manufacturing opportunities”. The final report and corresponding infographic is hot off the press and can be downloaded here.

 

Amid the hoopla of celebrating a deal to save 800 jobs at a Carrier Corp. factory in Indiana last month, President-elect Donald Trump promised to usher in a “new industrial revolution“—one that sounded as much like a social awakening as a manufacturing one.

How will the nation achieve that renaissance, though? If past is prologue, the Trump administration will lean on high-profile tweets and one-off job-retention deals combined with moves to renegotiate some trade deals to give U.S. workers a leg up.

And maybe those gestures will help.

However, there is another way to think about touching off an industrial revival in America that brings back economic growth, opportunity, and decent jobs for blue-collar workers.

That approach would embrace the Maker Movement as a deeply American source of decentralized creativity for rebuilding America’s thinning manufacturing ecosystems. An authentic social movement of hackers and tinkerers, the Maker Movement has grown increasingly consequential in recent years as a new generation of designers and entrepreneurs has employed online tools, 3-D printing, and other new technologies to “democratize” manufacturing and reinvigorate small-batch production and sales.

The makers’ locally-grown enterprises are expanding beyond their artisanal and hobbyist roots to create true business value. The movement has emerged as a significant source of experiential learning and skills-building, as well as creativity for the nation’s innovation driven manufacturing sector.

More broadly, there is momentum on the ground, both in large cities and small ones, located in both red and blue America, and there is much success to share.

Two years ago, 100 mayors signed a Mayors Maker Challenge to bolster making in their communities, and now, the just-published book “Maker City: A Practical Guide to Reinventing Our Cities” reports how these strategies are working across the nation. Long to short, the story here is that the Maker Movement isn’t just about reviving manufacturing in cities (though it is doing that). In addition, the movement is proving that anyone can be a maker and that genuine progress on the nation’s most pressing problems can be made from the bottom up by do-it-yourselfers, entrepreneurs, committed artisans, students, and civic leaders through what our colleague Bruce Katz calls “new localism.” That’s both empowering and a quintessentially American story, one that de Tocqueville would immediately recognize, and that Donald Trump might even like.

And so it’s time for the nation—and especially its local business leaders, mayors, hobbyists, organizers, universities, and community colleges—to embrace the do-it yourself spirit of the makers and start hacking the new industrial revolution one town at a time.

Ideally, the incoming Trump administration will see ät to foster this authentically American, red-blue movement with, for example, modest competitive grants to support local maker activity and expand interactions between makers and larger-scale commercial manufacturers. Federal cash, tax credits, and convening capacity could all make a huge difference to cash-strapped networks of civic entrepreneurs.

But even without such support, local leaders should take matters into their own hands and come together—city by city, community by community—to help build a new industrial resurgence that links local ingenuity to genuine economic development.

 

To help with that, here are five ideas for getting started:

Read the rest of this post on brook.gs/2hRBTFt

 

A designer works on a restaurant sign at TechShop in the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco, California April 24, 2014. In the shadow of Internet monoliths, it's easy to forget that Silicon Valley got its start from hard-scrabble tinkerers building radios, microchips and other devices. Now, a proliferation of high-tech but affordable manufacturing tools and new sources of funding are empowering a generation of handy entrepreneurs and laying the foundation for a hardware renaissance. A growing focus on hardware and the so-called

A designer works on a restaurant sign at TechShop in the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco, California. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith