Open, collaborative, and agile: the next industrial revolution | Paolo Sammicheli | TEDxSiena

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Paolo Sammicheli has been a ICT entrepreneur for about 25 years.
In this talk, the staggering success of Wikispeed shows us the beginning of a paradigm shift in which new co-design practices, coming from the software world, are about to contaminate the traditional manufacturing industry, creating a real industrial revolution.

My name is Paolo Sammicheli,

and my next car will travel
at 40 Km per liter.

I am here to tell you
the story of Wikispeed

and of a modern hero,
with a heroic name: Joe Justice.

In 2008, Progressive Insurance

offered a ten million dollars prize

for an XPrize competition,

challenging the attendees to build a car
that could travel 100 miles per gallon:

for us Europeans,

this means 100 Km
with 2,8 liters of petrol.

In 2008 there already were
some 100Mpg cars.

But they were more like this bobsled:
they could just host the driver,

and sure they didn't meet
legal road safety requirements.

One of the things
the XPrize commission asked

us to do was to meet
these road safety requirements

to drive in United States.

Joe Justice decided to join,
and at first he was basically alone,

but thanks to social media,
he started sharing via web

his experiences, his mistakes,
and the lessons he was learning.

And pretty soon,

a community of 44 people,
from four different countries,

virtually knocked on his door to help.

And so Wikispeed was born.

Wikispeed, in just three months,

with no corporate or university support,

built the first prototype
and joined the competition,

achieving a whopping tenth place,

beating more than 100 other cars
from all around the world

sponsored by universities and companies,

in what the New York Times
called "incredible".

How did they do that?

Joe Justice, just like me,
is a software developer,

and he took the best practices
of software engineering

to enable him to create products
and innovate quickly.

Flexible methods with weird names
like Scrum, Kanban, eXtreme Programming.

With the $10.000 consolation prize,

the team could afford
their car's road legalization tests.

In 2011, Wikispeed received an invitation

to show the car in the world's
largest auto show.

In Detroit, Michigan, in a sense
"the belly of the monster".

The world's most important
car brands would also attend.

Great excitement
in the team, but also panic!

The Wikispeed team wanted
something nicer, for a car show,

than the prototype
they used for the challenge.

But creating a custom shell,
would take three months and $36,000.

So Joe came back to school,
and took training in composite materials.

Once back with the team,

they started making models
of the new Wikispeed body.

Small at the beginning,
and a full size model later on.

And in only three days,
at a cost of just $800,

they built a carbon fiber body
for the exhibition.

It was so beautiful.

Thankfully, because
they were placed on the main floor,

between Ford and Chevrolet.

Everybody talked about them that day:

The New York Times Online;
The National Geographic; Wired Magazine;

even Rai 3 with "Report", in Italy.

Today Wikispeed has 1000 members
from 40 countries, and they build cars.

If you go on the Wikispeed website

it's just like any open source
software project:

you can download the plans for free
and build it yourself;

or you can order the parts,
and mount it yourself;

or you can ask them
to build one for you.

And they are doing
other interesting projects

like micro-houses
that cost less than 100 Usd

with a bed, a bathroom,
and a lockable front door

to help involuntary homelessness
with recycled material.

But the most stunning thing

that Joe Justice
and the Wikispeed team did

is showing that you can apply
some specific software methodologies

to build tangible products,

debunking a common belief
that this wasn't possible.

They organized the team
with a method called Scrum,

that in software creates cohesive
and very productive teams.

All members work in pairs,
taking the idea from eXtreme Programming,

so that knowledge is passed
from a team member to another,

thus also increasing quality and safety.

And the car is designed

with what we call in software
"object-oriented programming",

destructuring the car
in pre-defined modules,

with stable connecting interfaces

so you can change or improve
single parts of the car

without redesigning the entire project.

Still today, the Wikispeed chassis

is the lightest chassis
on sale in the United States

with a five-star rate
equivalency in a crash test.

They achieved it because security tests

are designed and created
even before the components to test.

We took this idea from software also:

it's called "Test-driven
development".

But above all, they proved
that even in building physical products

a team's mood
is a productivity multiplier.

Every industry
can benefit from these ideas.

And today, Joe works as an advisor,
helping companies all around the world

to find new ways
to create better products.

And here's where I met him last summer,

Colorado, north of Denver,
at the Scrum for Hardware Gathering,

which was the first international meeting

of these crazy software guys

driven by the idea
of contaminating the industry

with ideas coming from software.

We've been discussing for two days

about those software practices
that are best portable to hardware,

and the less portable ones.

Eventually we wrote
a document, a manifesto,

with principles and values
coming from our own experience.

Saturday morning we went
to a garage, at Hubert Smith's home,

the guy with the glasses behind me.

We had a Wikispeed build party -

namely, we built
a Wikispeed car from scratch.

Upon my arrival to the United States,

I said to myself,

"I'll probably be the only Italian,
maybe even the only European."

I was wrong.

Upon my arrival,
seven out of 30 participants,

plus me, were Italians, all working
on a company based in Ivrea,

founded decades ago
by former Olivetti employees.

During the day,

we had a lot of fun building the car.

It was also quite tiring.

At the end of the day Joe was super happy.

We mounted the four
suspensions on the chassis;

attached the wheels, the brakes,
the steering mechanism;

fixed the body, which got damaged
during the shipping;

and integrated all the parts

to ensure a perfect coupling.

According to Joe,

we did two and a half days worth
of a normal team's work

and could we have stayed
four more days in the US, he told us,

we could have turned our Wikispeed car on!

At the end of the day, exhausted
as we were, we all drank a beer together.

I went close to our host and I said,

"Hubert, your next car
is going to be built

by a bunch of nerd programmers,
and most of them come from Italy.

I suggest you buy
an all-inclusive insurance!"

(Laughter)

That day, a community of people was born,

with the idea to contaminate
industries of all kind

with ideas coming from software.

They wrote a document, a manifesto

with principles and values
around this idea.

In English, firstly, then
translated into Italian.

A website was then made

with experiences from companies
around the world

who started using these ideas.

In English, firstly
translated into Italian.

I felt something similar

during my first travel
to the US, years ago.

I went to California, to Silicon Valley,
to attend a conference at Google HQ.

On Saturday, with other colleagues,
we went to visit some museums.

And in San Jose,

the administrative capital
of Silicon Valley,

at the Museum of Science and Technology,

we found an exhibition

about Leonardo da Vinci,
a 16th century engineering.

Once in, just around the corner,

I found the history of Siena's engineers
and our old aqueduct.

On my way out,

our district's flags
hovered around the ticket office.

I basically flew across the ocean,

going to the world's
most technological place,

to find out that the world's
most technological place

was my own town, but 500 years ago.

Now it looks like a new
Industrial Revolution is coming,

they call it the Fourth
Industrial Revolution.

They say that it will no longer
be the bigger fish eating the smaller,

but the faster fish eating the slower.

That's exactly what happened
in the software industry

in the last 15 years.

In a few years, a bunch
of young guys in a garage

beat the giants of the stock market.

So if all the things

that gave glory to software
in the last 15 years -

the sharing, the open source,
the team work and the audacity -

if all these things

are about to seep
into all kind of industries,

well, I'm sure it's going to be awesome!

Thank you!

(Applause)