From P2P Foundation

From the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Design_Manufacturer

"An Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) is a company which manufactures a product which ultimately will be branded by another firm for sale. Such companies allow the brand firm to produce (either as a supplement or solely) without having to engage in the organization or running of a factory. ODMs have grown in size in recent years and many are now sufficient in size to handle production for multiple clients, often providing a large portion of overall production. A primary attribute of this business model is that the ODM owns and/or designs in-house the products that are branded by the buying firm. This is in contrast to a Contract Manufacturer or CM."

P2P Context

This models allows the branding and design to be separated from production, and could assist in the development of distributed Desktop Manufacturing strategies.