Bharath Open Bike
Bharath Open Bike - Open Innovation Stack for Bicycles
Challenge
Bicycles are the most widely used vehicle in the subcontinent of Asia and Africa. Even though the Bicycle is ubiquitous, the Bicycle is not adopted for commuting by the majority in Indian cities. And in many of the African countries the “Bicycle” is used for multiple purposes and they lack the availability of heterogeneous bicycles like Cargo Bikes.
Moreover the Bicycles suffer from quality & reliability issues, performance drawbacks. The reasons are multitude - lack of design culture, lack of product quality benchmarking, lack of standards for testing and centralized design and manufacturing. Another critical reason is the monopoly of design and manufacturing by 2-3 big companies, which have monopolized the supply cycles across both Asian and African Continents from India. Geography Dependency is brittle and holds us hostage in silos. One of the best examples is the non availability of Bikes globally, during covid due to the supply chain dependency of the bike production on crucial components like, derailleurs, chains and cassettes. The supply of these high end components is concentrated in a handful of companies. Due to non availability of crucial components in the market, fake products are entering the market. The Global Bike industry faced unprecedented demand and unstable and unreliable supply chains. The lead times of key components stretched to 10 months. The evergreen ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal, also broke the bicycle supply chain globally leading to high volatility of component suppliers' delivery commitments.
Bicycle Design is critical in determining its performance and reliability. And availability of quality components is crucial for the long life of the bicycle, as the cycles are refurbished by the local population and not dismantled - most of the time. Availability of High Performance components at affordable prices is critical to ensuring Cycling is Scalable across Asian and African Continents.
“Bharath Open Bike” - ADM Stack
(Architecture, Design and Manufacturing, Stack for Bikes )
We propose to develop an idea “Bharath Open Bike” as a combination of Architecture & Design Framework and Manufacturing Stack to transform the cycle industry from centralized to decentralized, autocratic to democratic, homogeneous to heterogeneous products.
The cornerstone of the open-source philosophy is that the recipients of this design system and material specification should have access to all its building blocks, such as material specifications, schematics for designs, in order to study it, modify it and manufacture and redistribute it to others. BOB has a double focus for the design community to design new vehicles , as well as SMEs and component manufacturers to manufacture the products and components, and for the purposes of training and education through specially curated resources in bicycle design and manufacturing.
“BOB” is a decentralized design and manufacturing enabling platform for Bicycles, with the potential to change how bicycles are designed, how bicycles are built and how the consumer uses and adopts bicycles for his daily needs. It is a Platform with a simple goal — allow designers and manufacturers to easily and sustainably build Bicycles which secure high quality performance and are usable enough for consumers to access.
BOB is a collection of design patterns and components we use to create a coherent cycling experience. It's a shared code base of individual component design and integrated product family design for making Active Mobility Vehicles for various needs.
Three Pillars :
1. BOB Platform Architecture & Design Methodology.
2. BOB Innovation Platform.
3. BOB Manufacturing and Market Reach platform.
BOB Platform Architecture & Design Methodology.
Focusing on development of product families based on design methodology and architectures. Consisting of a network of designers who contribute to the design and maintain the Design System. BOB shall evolve a design methodology leading to a design system for producing the design of a family of bicycles on a platform architecture.
BOB is intended to have a common platform with different modules. The modules will have a limited number of variants to reduce production complexity. This will allow the BOB Based brands to create differentiated Active Mobility Vehicles, whilst having a high degree of standardization.
- Facilitating independent brand identity for different vehicles
- New vehicles with standardized components and modules.
- Modular electric drive Architecture for the all-electric models.
BOB Innovation Platform.
“Innovation Platform” - The Innovation Platform combines the best elements of design and manufacturing to deliver the reliability, strong quality standards and high performance of products with innovation, openness and collaboration with manufacturers and researchers.
The core features of the Innovation EcoSystem are
1. PRODUCT DESIGN.
2. PRODUCT MANUFACTURING PROCESS & STANDARDS
3. MATERIAL & GUIDES.
4. RESEARCH & INSIGHTS
5. DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT PROCESS - Identify the elements of design and manufacturing process and quality parameters.
The “Bharath Open Bike” design system enables rapid and pragmatic iteration leading to Maintaining a design repository of bicycle products and components. Functional and Structural Models of components are published with specimens.
BOB Manufacturing and Market Reach platform
This pillar enables the SME sector to get insights about customer behavior and also manufacturing stack. The Marketplace helps SMEs to undergo the digital transformation.
ACTIVE MOBILITY MARKET SEGMENTATION
Track consumer behavior across unique segments. Take specific actions based on the value associated with each customer type.
ACTIVE MOBILITY PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT & PRICING
Gather customer feedback on new products and services early and throughout the development cycle to save time and money.
ACTIVE MOBILITY COMPETITIVE BENCHMARKING
Put everything into perspective by gaining an understanding of where products stand in relation to your competitors. Capitalize on key business differentiators and identify gaps in products and services.
ACTIVE MOBILITY DESIGN ACADEMIC RESEARCH
Tie up with top universities for academic research, giving professors and students a platform to capture insights and also learn about building products in real time.
ACTIVE MOBILITY STUDY BEHAVIOR
Dive into the behaviors that influence purchase decisions.
ACTIVE MOBILITY MARKET TRENDS
Monitor industry and market trends to keep R&D ahead of the curve.
BOB Market Place
Brings together buyers and sellers of an Active Mobility goods or service. aggregate product or service offerings from multiple sellers of Active Mobility BOB components.
Major benefits
BOB enables developing a multitude of active mobility products for heterogeneous needs. Secondly it expands the scope of manufacturing across geographies with design localization. We explore the emerging additive manufacturing technologies and decentralized manufacturing technologies which will enable the transition to democratic manufacturing - making bicycle design accessible and ensures the affordability of a purpose built bicycle. Regrouping highly distributed markets into a central location to manufacture is expensive, under-performant, and wasteful. Instead, pushing manufacture to the edges and designing in a distributed way with local context by coordinating its execution is a brand new possibility with Industry. BOB will Increase component availability across geographies and resiliency of the supply chain.
The Bharath Open Bike’s systems approach to design management, customer experience strategy and manufacturing process innovation helps product owners operate more efficiently and innovate faster with support of the ecosystem.
The Bharath Open Bike unlocks the potential of cycling by open sourcing the design and democratizing and decentralizing the manufacturing. A mechanism for knowledge sharing and engineering to produce high quality designs and processes.