#Transaction cost analysis of distributed production via Fab City OS - Research Outline
#Transaction cost analysis of distributed production via Fab City OS - Research Outline
In my job as chairmen of Fab City Hamburg Association it is my day to day practice to make distributed production for a circular economy a reality. The idea of fab city is that the, up to this day around 40, fab cities worldwide collaborate on open source hardware documentation, that is then transferred into physical goods in local - mostly standardised digital - manufacturing. However, the transaction cost for the global and even local collaboration is enormous. There are language barriers, insufficient standardisation, silos of communication due to different communication channels and so on. Though, this may change soon due to an EU-funded project in which the digital infrastructure for the global Fab City Initiative - Fab City OS - will be developed. It aims at making processes across all stages of the value chain of distributed production more efficient and competitive to linear production. In my research I want to shed light on what would happen if Fab City OS would become a success? Specifically, how would the economic governance change due to the reduction in transaction cost? Where would we see markets, where would we see firms and where peer production?
