.:aaron.helton:.
musings.of {'husband', 'father', 'technologist', 'international civil servant', 'humanist', 'skeptic', 'gamer', 'dreamer'}

In which I offer a potential model for monetizing 3D printers.

In case you don’t obsessively scour the Web for insights into new and nascent technologies, there is one you may soon become aware of: 3D printing. This is a manufacturing technique that’s been around a while, mostly in rapid prototyping. Consequently, it’s been quite expensive until recently. Today, a basic and very small 3D printer can be yours for a few hundred dollars, maybe less. And with it you can print any variety of objects whose materials can be shipped around as pellets or dust and that can be melted and extruded into 3D shapes.

For the time being, 3D printing is stuck in the hobby space, where it is evangelized as the next big thing by any number of geeks and futurists. It will remain there, sadly, unless someone can figure out a way to mass produce the equipment and distribute the printing supplies in ways that can also extract profits.

In a sense, this is like solving the razor blade or the laser printer problems from the past. This model entails selling one object at below cost (the 3D printer) and subsidizing it with its consumable partner supply (the material). We should all be familiar with this, because unless we buy plain disposable razor blades (I do) or don’t own a laser or inkjet printer, we are already using at least one instance of it. The major difference with 3D printing, however, is that there’s not just one material type to choose from, which complicates any streamlined mass distribution of cartridges. Further, some projects are composed of multiple materials, which means that users might be on the hook for multiple cartridges of materials.

There is a potential solution, but it would require some significant changes in manufacturing processes. Let’s assume that 3D printers can make objects whose durability equals that of objects made in other ways. So a ceramic coffee cup, which could be 3D printed today, should be as sturdy as one using an older process. Let’s further suppose that the manufacturing of parts can be cheaply offloaded to 3D printers, instead of requiring, for instance, machinists and the like. If that’s the case, then the solution is to subsidize both the printers and the materials by requiring people to print a minimum number of parts per month, which they shove in Netflix-style envelopes and ship to the assembly facility (or store; or customer). While the printers are not in use making widgets, the users are free to make their own items. In return, manufacturers provide a stipend of materials, selected by the users.

Now, there are a few problems with this, but they are problems that can be worked out along the way. The first that I envision is that shipping times may create a noticeable lag between low supply and the fulfilment of a re-order, which may in turn force users to keep a disproportionate supply of materials. These have to be factored into any supply chain models. Secondly, anything that affects a sufficient amount of printers will crimp supply lines for anyone relying on the parts printed in that area. I believe the first can be solved by operating distribution centers like Amazon’s fulfilment centers. The second could be solved by geographically dispersing print jobs and paying for this risk avoidance through increased shipping costs. Third, the more tasks the user has to manually perform, the less reliable the process will be. And fourth, users could possibly buy the subsidized printers and then fail to print the required parts. These last two can be solved or at least partially solved by automating as much as possible, such that the user’s 3D printer receives its instructions automatically and either begins printing or making terrible noises until the right materials are loaded into it. It might obviously be best if the materials arrived along with the templates, or with a code that activates the template (as in, this month you’ll be printing these lovely steel bolts, but when you’re not printing those, here are the other materials you ordered).

Of course, none of this is really possible until 3D printers get a little better at the consumer end and someone takes the plunge in convincing people to buy them in the first place.

Got any other ideas? Leave a comment.

Image: RepRap v.2 ‘Mendel’ open-source FDM 3D printer by CharlesC. Retrieved from Wikipedia and reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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