ICT has already revolutionized content creation and communications. In principle, today, everybody with Internet access, the right skills and equipment can produce digital content composed of virtual “bits” and make it instantly available across the globe. The same is now happening to manufacturing for everyone with access to tools like 3D printers. This inter-changeability of bits and atoms is being called the maker movement, which started as a community-based, socially-driven bottom-up movement but is today also impacting mainstream manufacturing through increased efficiencies, distributed local production and the circular economy. The maker movement thus has significant promise for increasing social, economic and environmental sustainability, but is it currently living up to this potential? This paper reports on work undertaken by the European-funded MAKE-IT project has examined this question through detailed qualitative and quantitative empirical research, including ten in-depth case studies across Europe and a detailed examination of 42 maker initiatives at Europe’s foremost city-based maker faire, supplemented by extensive secondary research. Despite the maker movement’s short history, the overall results provide sound evidence of its important though variable contribution to sustainability thus far. In addition, there is a strong gender dimension showing that females are underrepresented both as users and leaders of maker initiatives, whilst female leaders tend to achieve much higher sustainability impacts than their male counterparts. There is also clear evidence that maker initiatives in close collaboration with each other and other actors in city- and region-wide ecosystems are much more successful in achieving sustainability impacts than others.

Neil Gershenfeld called the Maker movement the next digital revolution as it placed the means of fabrication on people's desks. This paper looks at makers' ambition to do socially valuable things and critically reflects on their potential impact, whether makers’ societal impact can be recognised on micro- , meso- or macro-level. Paraphrasing Schumpeter, who explained innovation as a ‘new combination of production factors’, social innovation can be defined as a new combination of social practices. To add an empirical dimension, via qualitative research we have explored the expectations and values of makers. We chose to proceed from the concrete to the abstract by approaching 30 Makers with very specific issues they knew from their day-to-day work and asked them regarding their social ambitions in terms of inclusion, education and environmentalism. Eventually these questions led then to insights on the threads we outlined above.

Makerspaces and the availability of digital maker tools offer opportunities to create with their hands. Makerspaces and making have increasingly found their ways into institutions of formal and informal education but have yet not been explored in entrepreneurship education. Maker education holds the premise that learners work in a self-regulated and interdisciplinary way and develop a mind-set that enhances their self-organisation and self-efficacy. In the context of a European project, an educational programme, which combined maker and entrepreneurial education for fostering entrepreneurial thinking, skills and attitudes, was developed. This paper aims to understand and evaluate the direct effect of this maker educational programme on the development of non-cognitive (entrepreneurial) skills and attitudes, i.e. in relation to self-efficacy and creativity, as core elements of an “entrepreneurial spirit”. A creativity drawing test as well as a self-efficacy questionnaire were used to evaluate the maker educational programme and to measure individual effects on study participants. The analysis of the results shows a positive effect at the individual level in both creativity and self-efficacy when taking age and gender differences into account. A better understanding of the relationship between age as well as location specific settings and the resulting benefits in creativity and self-efficacy would be a worthwhile follow up research.

The article builds on the perceived gap between ‘RRI in theory’ and ‘RRI in practice’ and demonstrates the need for RRI training for different stakeholder groups so as to overcome this gap. The RRI Tools project has developed different kinds of materials and tools that can be used in RRI trainings. Based on the umbrella notion of RRI, as elaborated in the RRI Tools project which spans the six key dimensions of RRI, its process requirements, outcomes and stakeholders, the training illustrates exemplary exercises that would serve a different purpose: to raise awareness for RRI, to enable mutual understanding of different stakeholder groups’ perception on RRI, to reflect on RRI and to implement RRI in daily practices. Experiences gained from the various training exercises are described, which result in recommendations and guidelines on how to set up a multi-stakeholder workshop in terms of setting, methodology, content and participants.