Why is 3D printing said to be the third industrial revolution?

3D printing is a fundamentally different way of making things. Mass manufacturing relies on specialized equipment to make large series of identical things. If a new product is to be made new equipment, retooling or a completely different manufacturing line or process will be needed.

With 3D printing any shape can be manufactured by the same machine. The tool chain in terms of software and materials is completely adaptable to any new shape allowing for quick changes in the shape, design, look or feel of any particular product. It also lets you make unique things in production runs of 1 item which means that 3D printed products will have a higher specificity and higher utility to the customer while better being able to fill any niche.

A 3D printer is similar to a PC in the sense that a PC has many different possible uses and so the development costs of these machines can be spread out over many different industries and applications. The PC does not care what type of calculation it working on or what this calculation does, it is simply a universal calculation machine. Different calculations can be done at the same time and switching between them is instantaneous. Similarly a 3D printer does not care what type of thing it is building and is adaptable to build any thing, it is simply a universal making machine. In one print run many different types of products can be made simultaneously and switching is as quick as it takes to finish the last 3D print run.

This means that product development with 3D printing can be quicker and more accurate than non 3D printing product development. You can iterate continually with your final production technology and better design, develop and deliver products that meet the user’s needs better than products that take longer to develop.

3D printing software, existing design tools and 3D printing skills can all be used to make any number of objects that compete in any number of markets. A new version of your object could be designed while the old one is being printed on the machine. With a physical version of the final product at hand customer feedback can be given and designers can immediately adjust the file to meet that feedback. By the time you have gotten your injection mold made in China or your tooling done I could have sat around the table with my customers and developed and tested thousands of different versions of my product. Or I could have worked with thousands of people the world over to improve it together. By being not only quicker to market but also quicker to the perfect solution 3D printing will out-compete other manufacturing technologies.

3D printing is a two factor manufacturing process consisting of the machine and the material. Any improvement to the machine speed will mean that any product anyone wants to make with this machine will be faster to produce. Any accuracy improvement will make anything made on this machine more accurate. Any reduction of material cost will make anything that is capable of being made by this machine cheaper. Any improvement in material strength will make anything made with that machine stronger etc. etc. These improvements will be fueled by overall 3D printing demand which in itself will be fueled by all the different applications and products that are suitable for 3D printing.

At the same time improvements to materials and machines will also let more and more things be made by 3D printers bringing in new revenue to the industry. Improvements to machines will (before the advent of true auto hardware upgrading by the machine itself) take time to trickle down to the marketplace. But, any improvements in materials will immediately be transferred to all existing 3D printer owners (that can use that material).

3D printing itself is not one single technology but a host of different technologies that all layer by layer build things. There are literally tens of thousands (if not more) materials and processes (chemical, mechanical etc.) that can be applied to 3D printing. As the market grows demand and revenue will ensure that new technologies and entirely different 3d printing processes will be used for 3D printing.

Just as the PC and the internet eventually made global publishing, retail and distribution by private individuals commonplace in “the North” 3D printing will make manufacturing an activity that any individual that can obtain or “rent” a 3D printer can do. There will be differences between high priced industrial 3D printers used by large companies and the machines that individuals and smaller organizations can use. This will cause lag between what everyone can 3D print versus what those who invest in the most expensive machines can. But, the means of production are no longer locked up behind high factory walls.

As long as there is a self sustaining ecosystem of 3D printer and 3D printing software development the market will layer by layer make more of the world. Each thing that is 3D printed makes mass production infinitesimally less viable. Mass production with is thousands of copies of objects that are by design meant to appeal to the greatest identifiable group. Per definition all mass produced products suck. They are never meant to and never able to address any individual use case. No matter how cheap the millions of copies are they will never be perfect for an individual. With 3D printing one can have individualized production suited to one person or one use case.

3D printing makes unique things that work better. It also lets anyone with access to a machine make, sell and distribute these things. The current mass manufacturing paradigm works like early printing presses that take a long time to set up but then quickly can let the limited number of owners of these presses churn out many identical copies of the one item the press has been set up to make. 3D printing is more akin to twitter or Facebook whereby anyone can publish anything worldwide instantaneously, change their publication quickly and publish once again quickly also.

Mass manufacturing companies are Gutenberg’s laboriously arranging their type while their machine depreciates silently. They need big brands, distribution networks, worldwide shipping, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, footfall/online attention, financing and have to pay for all of that up front. Profits come later when many thousands have decided to buy that one thing that was designed for so many people six weeks, six months or two years ago. By having to front their investment, lots of inventory spread out throughout the supply chain, the risk of not selling this inventory and essentially working blind in trying to come up with products months in advance that need to be sold in their tens of thousands mass production is an inherently inefficient model.

This model might work for TV’s, plastic toy soldiers or Prada shoes. Things where the intricacies of connected mass manufacturing production chains provide enormous throughput and complexity without which the final product could not be made or where low cost is the only driver or where brand is paramount, respectively. Kings of distribution such as Inditex which understands fashion risk and footfall or Amazon which see the need to put a store in everyone’s pocket will also still thrive. Anyone else who is not a star in any of the above categories is dead.

Literally completely totally dead. Any physical distribution, any retailing, any manufacturing, any product development, any physical goods business that doesn’t fit into the above exceptions is dead. Either the stars of mass manufacturing will outspend you in developing their brand, scale and scope or 3D printing will kill your niche.

Contrast the inefficient, capital intensive, slow, plan months in advance, inventory, give a cut to lots of other people business model with a 3D printing model. I make what my customer makes when and where my customer needs it exactly to her spec and she often pays me up front too. For any good whereby the 3D printed version is indistinguishable from the mass produced one and whereby any higher costs are offset by speed or a higher specificity of the design 3D printing will inevitably win. By having a more efficient way to do business and being better able to give my customers what they need when they need it I will out-compete.

The market for which any good for which this is the case will be dominated by 3D printing. This might take a long time as we’ve currently as an industry with 1 billion in revenue barely able to make 1% of all goods well. 3D printing might need to be a 100 times larger in order to completely be able to self replicate many of the things that surround us. But, in my mind this is inevitable.

There are many opportunities in 3D printing. I don’t know how many people will have 3D printers in their homes. I don’t know how much of their things these people will make. But, it is important to realize that the “personal” or home 3D printing revolution is irrelevant. Even if it shall not come to pass 3D printing’s impact on the world will be enormous. 3D printing will have a huge impact on medicine in the areas of implants, prosthetics and the making of actual spare body parts for people (think about it, unlimited replacement parts for humans possibly radically extending life is but one of the business opportunities in 3D printing). Besides this 3D printing will have a huge impact on product development helping reduce product development cycles across industries from years or months to weeks or days. 3D printing will let individual designers, consumers and small companies compete worldwide in markets that where hereto shored up by barriers to entry. 3D printing will also have a big impact on current manufacturing which is what I’ve tried to describe above.

Any or several of the above impacts could completely not materialise and still the industry would grow and radically alter how things are made. By being a more efficient way to make things and by being a better business model for businesses 3D printing will gradually sweep away mass production. We used to have artisans, making to order individualized items for customer’s they understood. This was replaced by factories making low cost copies for the masses. 3D printing combines the best of these two ways of making things by lowering the cost to reliably manufacture anything on this earth to any specification, any individual wish or demand.

This is why 3D printing is a new industrial revolution one which will democratize manufacturing and make all of the products on this world better suit their purpose.