Business Opportunities and Future Directions

Abstract

The current approach for many manufacturing enterprises is to centralize product development, product production, and product distribution in a relatively few physical locations. These locations can decrease even further when companies off-shore product development, production, and/or distribution to other countries/companies to take advantage of lower resource, labor or overhead costs. The resulting concentration of employment leads to regions of disproportionately high underemployment and/or unemployment. As a result, nations can have regions of underpopulation with consequent national problems such as infrastructure being underutilized, and long-term territorial integrity being compromised (Beale, Rural Cond Trends 11(2):27–31, 2000).

The original version of this book was revised. An erratum to the book can be found at DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4939-2113-3_21

This chapter is based on VTT Working Paper 113 Digiproneurship: New types of physical products and sustainable employment from digital product entrepreneurship, by Stephen Fox & Brent Stucker. The terms “Digiproneurship” and “Factory 2.0” were first introduced in this paper, which is archived at http://www.vtt.fi/inf/pdf/workingpapers/2009/W113.pdf

An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2113-3_21