Trabant P50 http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant_(Pkw)

I believe in the power of 3D printing. I love that it shifts the power of making from the manufacturer to the designer. I love what you can make with it. I love it reduces Time to Market for new products. I love you can make super complex shapes with it, that are not possible any other way. I love to see people’s imagination run wild, when they grasp the concept. That is what the magic of 3D printing is about. The magic of 3D Printing is in what you can do with it, not in the actual technology. Contrarily to what many people think, 3D Printers are not High Tech.

I have worked with the 3D printer manufacturers. I enjoyed working together giving as much feedback as possible back into their development cycles. All the people you meet, sales, technicians, the R&D people, they all know their technology so well. Lot’s of them love their technology and work so hard to push it forward. And they do push it forward, step by step every single year.

But if you look at it from a wider perspective and for instance compare it to the semi-conductor industry, it is not High-Tech. Why? Let’s make a comparison to the semi-conductor industry. Lithography tools print lines with a precision of 3 nanometers with in-tool accelerations comparable to those at a rocket launch. And how much is 3 nanometers? Grass grows at 22 nanometers a second in spring. High quality 3D printers go at the pace of a turtle and for plastics with a precision of 16.000 nanometers which is 16 micrometers. Starting to see the difference?

Actually the average tech used in a industrial grade 3D printer is much less complicated than that of a car. Here’s an analogy: If you take a car, it’s like buying something for the price of a BMW5 and getting a Trabant. Seriously, it’s like buying a brand new $70k car, and just when you leave the dealership, they’d tell you, you can’t have anyone in the passenger seat next to you. (S)he might overload the car and cause it to break down. And, oh yeah, please change the oil every single time you drive, and please change the breakes after each 500 miles. Who would buy a BMW like that?

So do 3D printers suck? And are manufacturers not good at what they do? No, not at all. 3D printers are great machines already and will deliver more magic some day soon. The current manufacturers are improving their technologies year after year. But 3D printing is still in it’s infancy despite it’s 30 years of history. And that is the foundation of all the reasons why 3D printers are not High Tech yet.

First of all, until the rise of desktop printers and consumer services like Shapeways, you could sell a printer at very high prices and margins the like. You could sell 3D printed products for insane prices. Seriously, only a few years ago a B2B serviceshop could sell a small plastic prototype the size of an iphone cover for $800. In the past it was easy to make money. So why bother to work on efficiency or put a lot into R&D when the market is stable, all players are known and everyone is making money? Year over year the dollars spent per dollar sales at the public 3D printing manufacturers are half of that in the semi-conductor industry.

Another reason is that the 3D printing industry has seen a lot of consolidation in the last few years. It’s hard to focus on innovation, when as a management team you have to integrate lot’s of companies into your existing organization. Another effect of the current attention for 3D printing is the exceptional high growth of printer sales. Manufacturers have been so incredibly busy scaling their operations and supply chain, that it is hard to stay focussed on innovation and to get new innovations implemented into the ever larger organization and installed base.

But in that exceptional growth also lies the answer. High growth has and will attract more players. You can already see that the rapid rise of hundreds of new 3D desktop printer companies has pushed a company like Stratasys forward with the move of buying Makerbot. High competition and high customer demands for multi-material printing, clothing and devices will entice the old and new players in this market to develop new improvements and technologies at a faster pace.

Let’s go back to the car analogy. What did cars look like the first 30 years after Henry Ford? Exactly, not fast, safe, efficient nor comfortable. The reasons why cars are so much safer, so much more efficient and so much more comfortable is not only because of oil prices and safety regulations, but simply and mostly because of huge international competition and high customer demand, which only really happened decades after the first car was introduced. If this holds true for 3D printing as well, then we are up for an acceleration.

There is a bright future for 3D printer manufacturers in healthcare, to industrial applications and the consumer market. There’s cool stuff happening already: from printing electronics, high precision ceramics and metals, to yes nanoscale printing a 3D photonic lattice that flowes a light beam around a 90 degree bend. None of it is highly commercialized yet. With 3D printing becoming more normal and ubiquitous, I hope to see much more competition on the manufacturer side as it will benefit the customer. There is a opportunity out there for any old or new player who has smart ideas in this field. The question is, who will those players be? Can’t wait to find out!