Circular Makerspaces as entrepreneurship platforms for smart and sustainable cities

Abstract

The maker movement is rapidly growing and evolving into a living instrument for urban planning and circular economy. At its core, collaborative spaces that offer a variety of services (i.e., networking, knowledge transfer, training, etc.) and equipment, are making their appearance, with several typologies such as fablabs, makerspaces, or techshops. These spaces are mainly focused on stimulating creativity and enabling transformation of ideas into actual products and solutions, while actively supporting social collaboration and circular innovation. Nevertheless, in most cases, innovation support is limited to project development, without being followed by support on commercialisation, access to funding, and in general the stimulation of entrepreneurship, leaving high market potential untapped. This study explores the design of a circular maker entrepreneurship programme that is directly executed from within a makerspace to provide training and mentoring on fundamental business aspects and entrepreneurial skills, while supporting access to funding and market-driven networking. The programme introduced is currently being deployed in seven makerspaces, in six EU countries, delivering some first insights on the sustainability of this endeavour, including key challenges, limitations and mitigation measures.