Fab Lab Hanoi

Since Phuong and Vinh started with the idea of Fab Lab Hanoi, the mission of the lab evolved a lot. Before opening the space, Fab Lab Hanoi was aimedat being a makerspace including a fabcafé open to makers willing to create their own products.

But in March 2016, once the lab was launched, they instead decided to start with a co-working space for start-ups and to develop innovative products focused on healthcare, education and smart-home by themselves.

Since then, Fab Lab Hanoi’s team stepped back and settled down its model. From Monday to Friday, their co-working space is open to start-ups. In the future, they’d like to focus on hardware start-ups to which they could provide services, machines and consulting. Every Saturday, Fab Kids workshops take place in the lab.

Then during the evenings or on Saturday afternoons, workshops for adults are organized. Simultaneously, Phuong launched another activity, Fab Shop: Fab Lab Hanoi displays and sells products from the online electronic component retailer MME and gets 20% of margin.

If we look at the raw numbers, since Fab Lab Hanoi creation, 1,193 makers participated to workshops and 7 start-ups worked in the co-working space (including 1 hardware start-up). Basically, 40% of them are adults, 40% students and 20% children. And most of them have an IT background. Usually, those makers discovered the lab thanks to word-of-mouth, social networks and events. When users participate to a workshop, they are eager to develop a specific skill. Then, between 30 to 40% of the users come back to study further.

To stimulate its community, Fab Lab Hanoi organizes workshops for makers to present the project they developed thanks to the lab. Moreover, workshops are moments dedicated to networking and community sharing.

Currently, the maker movement is still very young in Vietnam. With only 6 official makerspaces, most of the makers are sparsely connected to high technology. One of Fab Lab Hanoi’s challenge is to democratize the maker culture to increase its numbers of users.

When Phuong kickstarted Fab Lab Hanoi as a private company, she received a grant from the Innovation Partnership Program (IPP) to cover 70% of her human resources during 1 year. The rest of the Fab Lab was self-funded thanks to 28 000€: 75% for the equipment and 25% for the place, knowing that she doesn’t need to pay the rent.

Monthly, Fab Lab Hanoi earns 1520€ from IPP, 400€ thanks to Fab Kids and 200€ via machine as a service, workshops and Fab Shop.

But those revenues can hardly cover the 2000-euro-monthly costs that include 1 520€ for the employees, 80€ for electricity and water and 400€ for the rest.

The main challenge for Phuong today is to sustain her model. To do so, she aims to develop the Fab Shop activity, target hardware start-ups for her co-working space, divide by 2 the human resources costs but also develop products for disabled people in partnership with other organisations. To equip her future hardware co-working space, Fab Lab Hanoi has just applied to the BIPP grant.

In order to track her activity, Phuong follows the number of products launched by the Fab Lab’s start-ups, of participants to the workshops and of revenues per month from the Fab Shop.

The composition of Fab Lab Hanoi’s team drastically changed. Formerly 8, the team went down to 4 full-time people: Phuong as director, Hoang as Fab Lab technician, Tam as operation manager and Giang Thi as administrative operator. To compensate the absence of the 3 fab masters and the co-founder, 6 students work as volunteers to help on different projects and think about education tools.

To manage her team, Phuong uses Trello for task management, Facebook for chatting and Google Drive for document sharing.

Different classes and workshops punctuate the Fab Lab day-to-day life with kid workshops every Saturday and adult classes every month on different topics: how to use digital tools (3D printers, CNC machines, PCB designing, Arduino tools, …), training for hardware start-ups, …

Fab Lab Hanoi gets also involved in the Vietnamese maker movement. That’s why for example they co-organized the SEA MakerThon with the SEAMNET in 10 cities across 6 countries last year.

To grow bigger, Fab Lab Hanoi set up several partnerships. They work with business organisations such as Kiss Start-up for workshops or some schools who want to bring the Fab Lab methodology to their classes. Moreover, they are mentored by MIT Five.

Currently, at Fab Lab Hanoi, all documentation is realized on google drive. It includes the equipment, the workshops but also the projects developed by the lab.

Once a maker’s project is finished, it must be documented on Fab Lab Hanoi’s google drive.

According to Phuong, their next step is to think about the opensource documentation of projects. To build its workshops and enrich its projects, Fab Lab Hanoi team uses Coursera and Instructables.