DiDIY – Digital Do It Yourself Analysing how DiDIY is reshaping organization and work

Making or Do–It–Yourself is at the center of both academic and practitioners studies. Makers are described as an emerging community of self–described DIY–enthusiasts, tinkerers and hobbyists. The new phenomenon of DiDIY is reshaping how we work and en–tire organizations due to the interactions among DiDIYers (and their aggregations) and between DiDIYers and their environment. For Digital Do–It–Yourself (DiDIY) we mean a new phenomenon based on two main factors. One is the widespread availability of devices (including, but not limited to, 3D printers) that make pro–duction of both physical and immaterial “objects” much easier and cheaper than it was even a few years ago. The other is the growing accessibility, often through open online communities, of the re–lated knowledge, designs and other data. This phenomenon has been gaining more and more importance in different fields: it’s not just influenced organization and work but also education and research. We aim at identifying the characterizing traits of a DiDIY–er in an organization. To do so we, first, presents Makers’ relevant attributes and then we draw on potential attributes pertaining to DiDIY– ers acting within a traditional (i.e. SMEs or Multinational) organizational setting. We present expected outcomes and we draw research directions for future works.