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To hear enthusiasts tell it, the technique of additive manufacturing, better known as 3D printing, has the potential to change not just manufacturing, but the world.

3D printing today makes prototyping and manufacturing complex, custom objects simpler but tomorrow, everyone will have a 3D printer on their desk and make their own sneakers and hats.

3D printing is getting hyped right now, with a front page story in The Economist and a long article in the Times, but we actually think it is underhyped.

Even if it fails to meet some of the expectations of its boosters (and that's not a foregone conclusion), 3D printing will still probably become an enormous industry and have a tremendous impact on how we buy, sell and produce things.

What Is 3D Printing?

Technically, here's -- very roughly -- how 3D printing works: a big machine takes a raw material, today mostly plastics and some metals, and melts them into a microscopic layer. And then another layer. And then another layer. Until you end up with an actual object.

Thanks to 3D printing, to manufacture something today, you need only a printer, raw material, and software to tell the printer what to print. This is why it's a big deal: it's potentially the biggest change in how we make things since the invention of assembly lines made the modern era possible.

3D Printing Today

What does 3D printing look like today? According to several reports, the sale of 3D printers and associated services like software is already a billion dollar market. But nobody disputes that 3D printing is very far from a utopian 3D-printer-on-every-desk future.

Today most 3D printing technology uses too few materials, and is too crude in some ways, for most finished products we buy today.

Here's what people mostly use 3D printing for these days:

  • Rapid prototyping. This was the early, and still the biggest business case for 3D printing. In plenty of industries from architecture to aerospace, the drawing board and computer screen only takes you so far. You need to build tangible prototypes to move forward. That used to be a big expense, and more importantly, a huge time-suck: there's no reason a designer should have to wait days for someone to make a prototype until they can move forward. With a 3D printer, designers can have a rough prototype quickly and be much more productive. The word "designers" is making it sound like it's a few guys in Brooklyn, but 3D printing is already changing the way we make buildings, cars and planes.

  • Specialty manufacturing. 3D printing is already being used for finished products, but still in specific niches. Some industrial components that would be costly or complex to manufacture are already being 3D-printed. One exciting area with huge potential is prosthetics, where 3D printer allow highly customized prosthetics to be made.

  • Hobbyists. One of the reasons why you hear about 3D printing is that there's a small but vocal and growing hobbyists community who enjoy making small doodads. The hobbyist component of 3D printing doesn't sound impressive, until you realize that the first people who cared about things like cars, planes and personal computers were hobbyists. 

3D Printing Tomorrow


But even if that scenario doesn't pan out, 3D printing is going to be a huge industry because it's much more efficient than traditional manufacturing. The main reason is that the current way to manufacture things is to chip away at a block or sheets of raw material, whereas 3D printing adds raw material as needed. Current manufacturing processes create as much as 90% waste. So even if 3D printing is limited to the business world, it's going to be a huge industry.

And the printer in every home scenario isn't that far-fetched either -- only as far-fetched as "a computer in every home" was in 1975. Like any other piece of technology, 3D printers are always getting cheaper and better. 3D printers today can be had for about $5,000.

From Here To There

So, how do we get from here to there, what are the pitfalls, the opportunities and the big questions?

Today, 3D printers are too unreliable, slow, rough, and manufacturing large objects is cost-prohibitive. It's hard to build objects with high polish. But early cars were slow, dangerous, and notoriously unreliable.

The biggest difference between today's manufacturing and a 3D printing world is going to be the advent of mass customization. When each product is printed individually from software, there's never going to be a reason to buy something that looks like something someone else owns. Companies will have to change not just their manufacturing but their product lines, marketing and even business models.

A serious question is whether 3D printing will be a "jobless industry." History and economics teaches us that new industries often end up creating more jobs than they destroy, either directly (blacksmiths replaced by car repairmen) or indirectly through higher economic growth, but there's a not-insignificant chance that 3D printing might be an exception. To be sure, 3D printing will create many jobs: in a world where anyone can make and sell most kinds of items, many people will profit and create new industries. But it's not sure that these people will be more numerous than all the manufacturing jobs that will be lost.

Now Meet The Players

Who are the companies at the ground floor of this revolution? What sets them apart? What do they have in common?


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This is one of the cases where the hype is justified.

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