Crowdsourced Small Volume Vehicle Manufacturing
Local Motors has pioneered how to achieve crowd-powered design and development of complex cyber-mechanical devices. In short, we have crowd-sourced the first production cars in the world. Further, we have pioneered new ways to bring these products to market by including customers in the production itself in a fresh type of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mixed with the Toyota Production System. This type of hardware innovation and production is the beginning of the 3rd Industrial Revolution.
In this session, together with heavy audience engagement, we will answer the following questions:
1. How to lead and engage a community in radical open hardware development?
2. When and in what industry is co-creation the right business model to employ?
3. How does someone build a community when he has none to begin with?
4. What does micro-factory production cost and how is it arranged?
5. How can crowd-funding and e-commerce play into the world of open hardware development?
Presenters
John B. Rogers, Jr., Co-Founder & CEO, Local Motors
John “Jay” Rogers is President, CEO and Co-Founder of Local Motors, a next-generation US-based car company that is changing the way cars are designed, built, and owned.
A car guy through-and-through, Jay grew up a student of the industry. His grandfather owned the legendary Indian Motorcycle Company and was the first Cummins Engine Distributor in the United States. It was Jay’s family and personal passions that inspired the most ambitious plan behind Local Motors: To create an open source community that works together to design and develop exciting, efficient vehicles and builds them locally in a sustainable manner with customer participation.
Rogers is a graduate of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School (Baker Scholar). His career has taken him from a startup in China to Ewing & Partners where he became a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), to McKinsey & Co and the US Marine Corps where he served for 6 years as an Infantry Company Commander.
Founded just 5 years ago, Local Motors is already home to more than 60,000 car design concepts, 25,000 community members, over 50 full time employees, 1 production vehicle, the Rally Fighter, and 1 prototype vehicle – the XC2v – co-created for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Jay’s story, and the Local Motors story of American innovation and co-creation, has been shared on numerous national and international television and radio programs, on the pages of the world’s most well respected technology and automotive publications, and via dozens of speaking engagements around the world.
Jay lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his wife and four young boys.
Sunday, March 10
