As large firms pursue their quest to support NPD and fuzzy front-end activities within their organizations, some have recently opted to create “corporate Fab Labs”. These spaces, which regroup an innovation-oriented community and provide any employee with a physical setting and open access to digital fabrication tools are also the birthplace of objects. A lingering and recurring question among practitioners and decision makers is: what do these objects represent? In terms of innovation, are they something, or nothing?This paper is an initial response to these reactions and develops a theoretical and empirical study of objects made in corporate Fab Labs. Building upon empirical data collected from a series of photos, we contribute a rudimentary tool for identifying the maturity of corporate Fab Labs as their objects cross three organizational knowledge boundaries: syntax, semantic, and pragmatic.
