DIY Manufacturing
Blogger Frank Piller has a nice roundup, including links to previous posts, on growing trend toward do-it-yourself user innovation, manufacturing, and distribution. It looks like the price of a 3-D printer has finally dropped to less than $5,000, though that doesn't mean you can just "print out" anything you can design on a computer. As this recent WSJ article (PDF file on non-WSJ site) reported, an early application is to make figurines of user's characters from World of Warcraft and other games. But some features, notably flowing capes, can be tricky.
I wrote about MIT management professor Eric von Hippel's research on user-driven innovation in this NYT column.