More "Make Tanks" Than I Realized

A while back, in conversation with Danny Hillis, I suggested that Applied Minds might be called a “Make Tank”, in a riff on the more traditional “Think Tank.” A make tank is a lab that figures out how to design and build hardware that solves interesting new problems. Squid-Labs, which has partnered with O’Reilly’s Make on a number of projects, is another. But here at the Where 2.0 conference, I learned of yet another: Moto Labs. You might think of Inventables as another type of Make tank. And as Nat pointed out to me, there are academic Make tanks, like Neil Gershenfeld‘s lab at MIT, or Tom Igoe’s at NYU.