From Bits to Pieces: Expoliting the Practical Business Innovations Opportunities of 3D Printing

This is a business book about a technology-driven and rapidly expanding opportunity for innovation, that most observers see as likely to parallel web commerce, mobile communications and digital media in its impacts. The press, YouTube and blogosphere are highlighting new marvels of 3DP by the month. From Bits to Pieces is a guide to how to start turning these into business innovation and create new value for customers, company and partners.

It presents examples from over fifty companies that go beyond just making something to using 3DP to transform customer relationsips, design, collaboration, time to market and the financial dynamics of innovation. It is hype-free and offers realism with imagination. The book looks at the patterns of value creation emerging from the pace-setters across a wide range of indsutries.

It also provides an executive briefing on the technology, materials, capabilities and limitations of the. The aim is to help managers build the understanding of the key terms and concepts that will enable them to make of their own innovation agenda. The emphasis is on value. 3DP is rich with invention. Invention enables innovation but it doesn’t in itself produce it. Firms need a value architecture that targets the opportunity of 3DP to offer new dimensions of value: Their value narrative, especially for customers.They must use it to leverage their value engine: the everyday business processes, collaboration, productivity and speed that determine their ability to find an adge in a world of every-challenging commoditization of products, cost pressures and speed as the currency of performance. They need, too, to position for the next waves of market, technology and competitive forces and sustain value creation and make it their opportunity platform for taking charge of change as their ally, not threat. From Bits to Pieces is rich with examples. These include cars and shoes, where 3DP is moving leaders towards the digital enterprise, medicine where surgery, custom implants, and printed human skin are expanding in use and impact, and aerospace where 3DP is helping halve the weight of parts and cut material waste by 90%.

It provides many examples of how 3DP is liberating designers, in architecture, light manufacturing, consumer products and many other sectors. It is opening up spaces for small firms to establish a profitable innovation space. Much of what is happening in 3DP is hype, small scale projects that won’t scale up and ones that are neat but don’t open up a path to value. Some of the most intriguing and optimistic discussion is about what 3DP will lead to: new generation supply chains, perhaps consumer adoption of design it yourself and print it at home, and new modes of customization. But what do you do now?