Emerging Trends and Wrap-Up

Carey Business School students visited Autodesk on November 9th, 2012 and saw a 3D-printed dinosaur in the company's gallery.  President and CEO Carl Bass met with the group and emphasized the Millenium generation's sharpness in realizing that we needed to become tri-sector athletes in technology, entrepreneurship, and management.  Autodesk's Lego dinosaur is more than an attraction: it's a nod to the innovative, creative, sometimes wacky start-up company culture.  Autodesk has been an established software company in San Francisco since March 1986 when they released AutoCAD.  Mr. Bass spoke to us about how Autodesk struggled to stay ahead of competition, specifically from Microsoft and Apple. Mr. Bass mentioned this trend, and it's also highlighted in "Imagine, Create, and Design," an annual company "design" book given to Carey students by the CEO during the visit.  Autodesk company changed strategies in the 00's and began to target innovative software solutions for industry-specific designers and architects.  According to Mr. Bass: 

"What's exciting to see is that emerging digital tools are actually making it possible for more people, in more situations, to design well.  Those who don't even consider themselves to be designers are doing what was unthinkable a few years ago: visualizing their renovated homes, fabricating toy robots with their kids, and animating short  movies." (Imagine. Design. Create)   

Autodesk is a company that has lived and breathed "innovators" and "early adopters" since the mid-1990s.  Their strategic shift allowed the company to stay in business, according to Carl Bass.  

Below is the graph depicting diffusion of innovation - 3DP technology is currently on the border between "Early Adopters" and "Early Majority" curve.  Our team predicts that 3DP will move to the right of this curve as pricing drops and expansion of technological benefits to society occurs.  Currently, the average price of a 3D printer is dropping to $12,500, with the spread in prices ranging from $500 (the Staples Cube model we mentioned earlier in this blog) to $50,000 for manufacturing and industrial-specific printers.  We predict 3DP will move to the right of "Early Majority" on the curve, or 50% market saturation, as early as 2020.  We arrived at that year after extensive research, primary interviews with company stakeholders, as well as research papers sourced from the Johns Hopkins Library.  Pricing prediction and market saturation rates were tough to calculate, as many of the $500 3D printers are toolkits for hobbyists to build at home.  

Source: JHU Professor Toby Gordon

3DP is currently in between Stage 1 and 2 of the Product Life Cycle, depicted on the left.  Toby Gordon, our professor for a course called "Discovery to Market" here at Carey, gave us valuable insight and help with our 3DP project, and inspired us to apply concepts learned in her course to our discussions and research direction.  (Note: We used this graph in her class, and were actually tested on 3DP for her final exam.)  We hope that 3DP will accelerate in Stage 2, and reach Maturity Phase by 2020 as well.

Overall, 3DP is helping designers bring more "real world" adaptation into their creations through 3DP technology.  Technology, after all, seeks to make people's lives easier and drive innovation to levels unbeknownst.  Communication helps us stay linked, work together, and foster innovation.  Information is at the heart of it all: without the desire to have it, to develop it, to make it more accessible, the human race wouldn't have DVRs, televisions, radios, low-priced cameras, cell phones, and wireless internet.  

Our group learned a great deal from researching 3DP, and strongly believe in our ideas and thoughts on emerging trends in manufacturing and healthcare for this technology.