Maker Culture

“The Maker Movement and startups were made for each other.”
-Martin Zwilling, entrepreneur and startup mentor

Makerspaces are hotbeds of exploration, creativity, and innovation. When people have the opportunity to work hands-on, work collaboratively, and draw on a community’s worth of skills and strength, ingenuity thrives. These spaces can also be launchpads for starting a business. Maker culture and the entrepreneurial spirit go hand in hand.

Accessibility: Fueling the Entrepreneurial Spirit

Starting a business requires more than an innovative idea, product, or solution. It requires tools, equipment, space, and infrastructure. These are resources that are often in short supply for budget-strapped aspiring entrepreneurs. Makerspaces give them access to vital supports that can allow their ideas and vision to grow into fruition.

From 3D printers and heavy manufacturing equipment, to intricate tools and the space in which to use them, makerspace users can benefit from communal resources. They can also take advantage of communal expertise. Need an engineer to help you draw up plans? Look to the professionals in your coworking community. Simply want to run your ideas past some objective ears? You’ve got it.

Making Businesses in Makerspaces

If you want to build, make, or create something new but you cannot do it on your own in terms of equipment or people, makerspaces put it within reach.

For example, when Tom Panzarella, CEO of Love Park Robotics (which operates out of a Philadelphia makerspace) wanted to attach video cameras to a wheelchair, he knocked on a door down the hall and hired a mechanical engineer. He says, “We effectively contract out to him some of our mechanical work, and it’s like we have a mechanical engineer on staff.”

A prototype that could set entrepreneurs back $100,000 with traditional approaches, for example, costs a fraction with a coworking model.

And, as Panzarella says, “You’re not these two guys in a garage building a robot, right. You have your 21,000-square-foot production space; the boardroom here is really nice if we need to have meetings. We look a lot more established than we really are.”

Building Your Career and Business with Hub & Spoke

Hub & Spoke intends to offer interested students, and adult members of the community, a skilled trades incubator where new ideas can be shared, projects developed, and abilities taught. Proven experts in the various trades will be on hand to share their knowledge and lend their professional guidance.

The heart of the project will be the Community Connect – a magnetic atmosphere of coworking, retail showrooms and makers leading the way to innovation and a greater good by leveraging connection and collaboration.

At Hub & Spoke, the Makerspace invites students, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, and other members of the community in to create, share their skills and strengths, and forge connections. These may just help you take the next steps to fulfilling your entrepreneurial dreams.

Be a part of something big at Hub & Spoke, find out how you can get involved today!