Has Additive Manufacturing Finally Arrived?

Additive manufacturing (AM) and the know-how of 3D printing has been around for last 30 years. While most people get 3D printing in the rapid prototyping context and immediately start thinking about exciting one-off products such as organs or print entire homes — the reality is much different. In my last five months working in this space, I have been humbled by two things. First, at-scale manufacturing is all about “operations first” and the second is need of “growth mindset leadership” in manufacturing organizations. While the former creates a push for AM into prime time, the latter creates a pull for of AM capabilities.

“Operations first” may read as an intuitive and simple to understand. However, it is at the very heart of manufacturing. For AM to supersede traditional manufacturing operations, it has to excel at the following things:

“Growth mindset leadership” this is where the operations first mindset meets the business growth mindset. AM is a truly new and disruptive approach of making parts or final products. However, for the last 30 years, AM has been primarily used for rapid prototyping due to poor materials choices, slower technologies, anisotropy, and imperfections at the surface and within. As a result, the true business value of AM approach and rightfully so has not been realized. This is where growth mindset leadership can become a real differentiator for organizations.

With the issues solved with Carbon’s technology, business, and product development teams for the first time have the ability to manufacture the unthinkable geometries using an AM technology. These complex geometries are extremely hard to make using traditional manufacturing technologies and typically require multi-part assembly. While AM enables inventory-on-demand and mass customization as expected, to take these capabilities to true production scale requires the growth mindset in leadership.

If product development teams continue to work within the same design and manufacturing constraints, they will continue to create products within that same constrained space. AM in many ways is a new degree of freedom and unlocks new design flexibility and manufacturing freedom. Product leaders and business leaders who are willing to challenge their internal teams to leverage new technologies such as AM will outperform their competitors and will get a head-start to build new organizational capabilities.

In summary, the onus is on 3D printing companies to build operational empathy with their end users to generate the right push as well on the leadership in manufacturing organizations to catalyze the right pull if they truly want to spur growth and disruptions in the manufacturing sector.

All views, opinions, and statements are my own

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