ISVOR Fablab

Isvor is a company of 100 employees. Their role is to train employees of the industrial sector, like automobile, both on technical and soft skills. For special courses, they work with 300 technical consultants. Among Isvor employees, three are working in the Isvor fablab. Carolina is the creativity director of Isvor and became responsible of the lab activity. Vivian is fully dedicated to the technical use of the lab. She also plays the role of mentor to help users to use the machines. Occasionally, they are helped by trainees like Gabrielo in 2018 who doesn’t lack of inspiration and creativity. They all gather around a common spirit considering that a fablab is more about people than about things. Thus, each time they work on new technical or soft skill training, they have a specific focus on the user experience following the strategic pillars of Isvor which are the same for the lab team :

• Andragogy
• Design thinking
• Sustainability
• Protagonism

Besides, their lab activity, they participate in the animation of the Brazilian maker community by taking part to the organization of maker events like « campus party ». Also, they are actors in the structuration of the Brazilian fablab network. Their goal being to create a Brazilian fabfoundation to address more easily company needs.

As a corporate university Fablab, the team welcomes 3 types of users :

• The employees of ISVOR, who design and teach pedagogic programs
• The clients of ISVOR
• The general public

« It is not about things, it is about people ». For Carolina, the use of the space is clear: employees of ISVOR are not using the Fablab to make things but to create an experience for people to change their mindset, based on the maker spirit. Márcia Naves, the director, encourages all the members of ISVOR to come in the space, use the machines, make their own projects to be familiar with it. Then, they try to mix profiles, designers and engineers, to create personalized workshops where people will learn to collaborate, to iterate, to value the error as a learning process, to be curious and creative.

¨¨The clients mainly come from industries. They are scientists or engineers and belong to a traditional pyramidal organization. Managers and directors of such companies **want to transform their way of working to tackle the new market challenges. Their use of the Fablab is one step of a comprehensive and specific program designed for them. For instance, they had to fix a communication issue among scientists of a R&D department. Each of them used to collaborate with external professionals but never with each other. They made them work on a common challenge where communication and creativity were key and they succeed to create a team spirit and to value the collaboration with each other.

Marcia and Carolina strongly believe in the power of the multi-disciplinary team so they support the external people in their project with the resources of the space. They want to show people the benefit of working with people from different areas and they also learn new ways of working with them. Thus, the Fablab is opened for everyone every Wednesday from 8 am to 3 pm. Users have to bring their material. They are mainly entrepreneurs or students in engineering, design, architectures or medicine and some of them, with a long term project, have benefited from a specific access to the space (every day during a limited period). Thus, the Fablab have supported a medicine student who designed a hearing aid or a designer who made a prosthetics with a social incubator.

To attract people in the space, a specific communication is made :

• internally, they promote the freedom and cool atmosphere of the space, which can be used without permission. For new users, Carolina just evaluates the training required to use the machine and possibly plan a specific course with Viviane. People are supported to start with an accessible and fun project in order to break their apprehension and gain confidence.
• externally, the Fablab communicates under the name of ISVOR through social media and many events (Campus Party, FabX, MakerFaire, Arduino Day…). Their objective is to focus on human transformation rather than product making. In fact, they aim to optimize their resources to achieve their mission with new clients.

To attract new clients, the Fablab also organized open talks, called Da Vinci talk, where everyone is invited to discover and discuss about a topic link to the work transformation. They also collaborate with organizations which support entrepreneurs, such as Fieng lab or Seed, to learn from them new ways of working and to foster synergies between start-ups and companies.

« We don’t have a specific budget, we have to earn it ».

The investment of ISVOR in the Fablab was significant for the company. With it, they bet on the future. 3 years later, it is fully integrated into the organization and, such as every department, it needs to be used for clients.

The rent of the space, the energy and the human resources are covered by the University. However, the variable costs are paid by the Fablab with the budget they earned. In addition, they have to demonstrate the use of the place to monetize the investment.

As a consequence, their objective is to make employees understand the potential of the space and to support them in the design of relevant workshops. They earn a percentage of each program sold where the Fablab is used. They also signed partnership with the Nacional Organization of Industrial Learning, the SENAI to financially support the training of technical employees about new technology.

Even if the use of the space has increased since its creation, they need to make it more lucrative. This objective is closely linked with the strategy of the new FCA CEO which asked them to double the percentage of the external clients (versus clients from the FCA group) from 30% to 60% in 2019.

The team is confident to reach this target. In fact, a famous TV show advertised the concept of Fablab which triggered the company interest and they will use their experience and the creativity and collaborative spirit of a Fablab to attract clients and to offer them relevant and efficient contents.