We connect Universities, makers and enterprises around open design & manufacturing
OD&M is a Knowledge Alliance dedicated to create and support communities of practices around the Open Design & Manufacturing paradigm, making the most of openness, sharing and collaboration to create new value chains of innovation in design and manufacturing oriented to the social good.
We are a community of students, university professors, researchers, makers, entrepreneurs and OD&M practitioners distributed across Europe and China. We pursue multi-disciplinarity, horizontal collaboration, challenge-based working and collective discovery as the salient features of empowering learning environments leading to social innovation in design and production.
By creating new means and methods to strategically connect Universities, maker communities, enterprises and stakeholders, the OD&M Alliance works to create meaningful flows of knowledge exchange, able to generate new research and concrete experimentation of products and processes based on the OD&M paradigm.
We support the co-creation of knowledge on open design and manufacturing
The OD&M Alliance supports the co-creation of knowledge on open design and manufacturing across University staff and students, maker communities, manufacturing enterprises and stakeholders. Our goal is to achieve in depth understanding of how an OD&M paradigm can be successfully applied to business models, production processes, products and organizational forms, and which new knowledge, competences and skills are needed to boost it at meaningful scale.
Check out our latest report on how Universities, maker communities and manufacturing enterprises across Europe are actually collaborating and promoting synergies on this topic.
We host inspiring events to boost open design & manufacturing at scale
OD&M is committed to the creation of inspiring enabling environments for university students and staff, makers, manufacturers and passionate people. Through international learning mobilities and thematic events organized across our hubs in Europe and China, we support networking, learning exchange, collaborative research on common challenges and co-creation of new products and processes based on the open design and manufacturing paradigm.
We create meaningful learning journeys across creativity, experience and collective discovery
OD&M needs a completely new wave of knowledge and skills able to tackle successfully the complexity of present times. Robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, digital platforms, IoT promise to reinvent the way through which we design and produce physical objects. However, OD&M is not only about ‘hard’ technological skills, but rather it demands an unedited focus on soft skills – social and system skills. How can we shape distributed learning environments that make the most of Universities, makerspaces and enterprises to create a new generation of makers? OD&M drives innovation in teaching and learning, working on distribution, peer to peer and continuous learning as the salient principles of our OD&M enabling environment.
We promote open and collaborative learning environments across University, makerspaces and enterprises
Universities, makerspaces and enterprises are all contexts of learning. Within each of them, learners can acquire a number of different skills for both work and life, be they hard or soft. However, these contexts often lack an overall common language and method to mutually recognize and acknowledge the learnings achieved within each of them, preventing learners from capitalizing on their own experience.
OD&M is committed to the validation of learnings acquired through our environment, allowing all learners and learning contexts to count on easy-to-use and engaging tools of skills recognition and certification that are portable and transferable across education, working and life settings.
