Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, August 30, 2017

Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas

I recently was privileged to receive an invitation to present at a regional conference in northeastern Ohio. The WSOS Community Action Commission (WSOSCAC) of Ohio organized the event which was a gathering of seven small area communities to generate some solutions to the problems and challenges they face.

I was in good company, joined on stage by Gary Schoeniger, founder of the globally recognized Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative (ELI) and developers of the revolutionary Ice House entrepreneurship program. “Ice House” is relatively new, I’ve been using it since the fall of 2012 when only 10 community colleges in the world were offering this very different method of conveying knowledge about successful entrepreneurs and how they think.

We’ve learned in the last two years that Entrepreneurial Mindset combined with Fab Lab or other maker space resource can be a powerful economic development tool for the revitalization of small rural communities when used in conjunction with the other efforts being executed by those small communities.

Deb Martin, one of the event organizers of this event gave me a very nice quote to use in our press release. She said “We have been familiar with the work of Independence Community College and its Fab Lab and other programs for some time now, and believe that it represents a great model of what can be done in rural areas to support revitalization through entrepreneurship.”

WSOSCAC’s roots date back to the 1960’s with a primary purpose to fight poverty. They are seeing, as are we, that entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking are really the only plausible solution to poverty in the United States. Based on Gary Schoeniger’s work with Ice House all over the globe, we can consider this solution to be global in scope.

Listening to the folks from these seven rural Ohio communities and others previously I realized their concerns are shared by all other small communities around the United States. We’re all concerned about a number of the same issues; youth leaving, population shrinking, economic mainstays becoming obsolete, shortage of work force and lack of soft skills in the existing work force. The participants in this northeast Ohio meeting were saying the exact same things that participants of such a meeting in southeast Kansas would say.

We have come to believe that every community should have a Fab Lab or maker space of some kind. It doesn’t have to be as big as Fab Lab ICC; a laser and a 3D printer in the local library or other local gathering place, even coffee shop, could make a huge difference if the mindset is changing too. The maker space has to be combined with entrepreneurial mindset to be an effective catalyst to aid in small rural economic development.

Our strong belief in this concept of combination is due to the number of entrepreneurs and small businesses we’ve help in such a short time of being open. It was not due to a superior strategic plan; we didn’t have one. We just managed to set up a good environment for collaboration with some cool fabrication equipment and people started coming.

The ELI (Ice House) folks tell us that although they have implementations of Ice House happening all over the world in several languages, no one is yet combining Ice House with a Fab Lab or maker space to spur small community economic development.

In February of next year, we are going to host a 2 ½ day seminar in Independence we’ll bill as “How to Create a Fab Lab from scratch.” We’ll share our knowledge of what we did and also include plenty of actual making during the time. We believe some of the folks from Ohio will come for the event and we’ll be promoting it around the country. One key message will be that the maker space won’t work without community entrepreneurial mindset. Another key message will be “there is no master plan for creating the right maker space for your community so don’t over plan. Start small, change the mindset and let things start to happen on their own.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter August 23, 2017

Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas

I would not want anyone to think I frequented pool halls as I was going to high school so I’ll relate this story through a friend that did. The game of snooker is a cue game played on a table larger than a pool table and with smaller pockets, making shots more difficult. In snooker, points are made by sinking the correct balls into the pockets. Besides the larger table and smaller pockets, in snooker you can actually have points deducted if you hit the wrong ball first or if your cue-ball doesn’t hit any other balls at all. When you manage to leave the balls in position where your opponent finds it difficult or impossible to hit the correct ball first, he or she is “snookered” and at a high risk of losing points. Thus, part of the strategy in snooker is to try to “snooker” the other player, forcing the loss of points. We, I mean my friend, had a class-mate named Brad that was a pretty good shot, but would get so involved in trying to snooker the opponent that he often lost the game, not making many points for himself. It’s hard to make your own points when your main focus is causing the opponent to lose points.

Competition in the marketplace is a good thing and can be responsible for many innovations and improvements in products and services. Like Brad, however, some businesses, are so busy trying to beat their competition and make them lose that they don’t do much good at bringing added value to their customers.

The phone companies are a good example of this. Their marketing messages are so busy telling us to dislike what the competition is doing; they don’t do such a good job of telling us what benefits we’ll receive by using their own products.

Some auto dealerships speak of “crushing their competition” and even the auto manufacturers join in the counterproductive message of putting down their competition instead of proclaiming their own benefits.

Health care institutions, relatively new to the concept of competition, also sometimes get caught up in this game too. They usually don’t overtly call out the other ones’ services or doctors as bad, but there are subtle messages between the lines that put down the competition instead of sticking strictly to a message that “we’re here to take care of you in the best way possible.”

Besides the fact that many consumers are turned off and tune out the noise of these marketing messages that merely put down the competition, there’s another cost. Within a given market, there often are not many break-through innovations when all the players are down in the weeds slugging each other in their marketing messages.

Henry Ford could have gone around talking about how poorly the horse-drawn wagons and carriages of the day were, but instead, he developed a break-through innovation and came up with a way to make cars affordable to the average family of the time.

Competition is the backbone of free enterprise and those with an entrepreneurial mindset are always looking for ways to improve current offerings of products and services. When done right, competition can lead to break-through innovation and better use of our resources. When the players in the market merely engage in trying to “snooker” the completion, no one really gains.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, August 9, 2017

Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas

Productive Struggle calls on us frequently at Fab Lab ICC. No, I’m not talking about “Julia” with an urgent call to update my Google listing. That would be “unproductive struggle.” No matter how many times I block Julia’s number, she seems to be able to come up with another. I guess that’s another topic for another day.

Lab manager Tim Haynes first heard the term Productive Struggle at the USA Fab Lab Network symposium he attended back in March of 2015 after we’d been open only six months. The term represents the idea that many activities in a Fab Lab or Maker Space are hard to do or learn at first, hence the “struggle” part. When we get past the struggle and learn or master the activity or task, we feel a certain sense of accomplishment, the “productive” part. Productive because each struggle that ends in accomplishment builds our self-confidence; the psychologists call it self-efficacy, a special kind of self-confidence that leads someone to become a better problem solver. This better problem solving ability knows no bounds, applying to all aspects of a person’s life, personal, professional, academic and even spiritual.

Since I’m in the business of running a Fab Lab, I see lots of videos about new technological machines. Some of the machines are on the market, ready for purchase by a Fab Lab or Maker Space. Sometimes the machines are in development, with a Kickstarter campaign nearby just in case you want to invest in the further development of the machine. The videos never show the Productive Struggle involved with actually getting the machine to work. Those parts are conveniently edited out so that we get only the part of someone gingerly pushing a couple of buttons or clicking a couple of links with the end-product magically appearing a short time later. No muss, no fuss. In our experience, we have never used the terms no muss and no fuss with any of the machines we have set up an learned to use at Fab Lab ICC.

Productive Struggle affects not only those of us running the lab, but also our members, students and event participants. We tell people that the software and machines make it possible for all people to be able to make almost anything, but “you have to be willing to learn new things.” That’s what Productive Struggle does, teaches us new things after a bout of struggle.

The young participants in the recent week-long Fab Lab ICC/Greenbush Boot Camps learned of another form of Productive Struggle. We hosted up to 24 kids at a time with two teachers and two volunteers along with Tim and I. We couldn’t answer the questions fast enough so some of the campers had to learn to figure things out on their own and not be dependent on someone else; that’s a good thing.

In the end, if we have the right mindset, Productive Struggle is a very good learning tool providing lasting lessons about how things in the real world work. When we mess something up and have to learn what to do to fix it, we learn and retain much more than if a teacher tried to tell us the right way in the first place. By the way, the teachers often don’t know the right way. While running a Fab Lab is a Productive Struggle in and of itself, we share the boosts in self-efficacy with all of our members and participants, the overall experience a  great benefit to all of us.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter August 2, 2017

Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas

Fab Lab ICC is a regional community resource —the name is short for Fabrication Laboratory at Independence Community College, but many people say Fabulous instead of Fabrication. We are chock-full of equipment, supplies and accessories to allow people to come in and make things. There are no geographic limits and no age limits, although most youth under the age of 14 come with family, or are part of organized classes or camps. The Lab is available through a public membership program whereby individuals can learn to make almost anything using the lab’s equipment for an annual membership fee starting at a little over $100. Families, living in the same household, can belong, with access for everyone starting at about $200. We have a “sustaining” membership category for those that want to support us financially, but for one reason or another, can’t participate in lab activities. Some of our classes, like those hosted by Fab Lab Divas, do not require membership to participate.

We belong to the International Fab Lab (IFL) network, a global association that grew out of the first Fab Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in about 2000. When we opened on October 1, 2014 we were one of about 200 Fab Labs in the world. Today there may be over 700 globally, but still relatively few in Kansas. Fab Labs are a subset of a larger and more broadly defined category; Maker Spaces. Maker Spaces don’t have to be as large as ours but some, as with one in Houston are quite large at 40,000 square feet. We occupy most of the 8,000 square foot training facility Cessna built (no longer uses and title has passed to the college) in 1996. We are preparing to break ground on an additional 8,000 square foot building that will be connected. At 16,000 square feet, we believe we will be the world’s largest Fab Lab in markets of 50,000 or fewer people.

Early on, we discovered the psychological benefits to people learning to make things. The sense of empowerment and self-confidence that occurs as people learn to make is called self-efficacy by the psychologists. This increase in self-efficacy seems to happen in nearly everyone, regardless of age, gender, socio-economic status or any of the other ways in which we categorize people. In the beginning, our mission was “to help people make things.” Now, we see our mission as “Improving the self-efficacy of all Fab Lab ICC users.”

We also discovered early that the self-efficacy boost is especially beneficial to entrepreneurs and small business owners struggling to start or grow small businesses. Some Fab Labs and Maker Spaces prohibit members from making things to sell or promote their businesses. Not us. We encourage members to make things on our machines they can sell to their customers. We also encourage members to use our equipment to make promotional and marketing items for their businesses. The entrepreneurs and small business owners tell us regularly of the sense of empowerment they get when they make their own signs, prototypes or marketing materials.

For those that are so busy with their businesses that they don’t feel they can get away to do their own projects in the Lab, we have a group of entrepreneurs ready to contract with them to get their Fab Lab ICC projects finished.

What we’ve discovered in our two and one-half years of existence is a potential for entrepreneurship combined with Fab Lab to increase the self-efficacy of a large area around Fab Lab ICC resulting in rural economic development and perhaps even the growth of populations in our small rural communities. I’ll be taking much of this message with me to a small group of rural communities in eastern Ohio in a couple of weeks.

I don’t like the concept of “best practices” especially related to anything Fab Lab. The institution of Fab Lab is still too new for any of us in the Fab Lab business to consider what we do to be “best practices.” When we speak about these things, it’s from the perspective of telling our stories and lessons learned and letting those listening decide how they might use the information to benefit their own rural communities. We strive to become a national leader in combining entrepreneurship with the Fab Lab experience in small rural communities.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jc