Business Opportunities and Future Directions
The current approach for many manufacturing enterprises is to centralize product development, product production, and product distribution in a relatively few physical locations. These locations can decrease even further when companies off-shore product d
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Business Opportunities and Future Directions
18.1
Introduction
The current approach for many manufacturing enterprises is to centralize product development, product production, and product distribution in a relatively few physical locations. These locations can decrease even further when companies off-shore product development, production, and/or distribution to other countries/ companies to take advantage of lower resource, labor or overhead costs. The resulting concentration of employment leads to regions of disproportionately high underemployment and/or unemployment. As a result, nations can have regions of underpopulation with consequent national problems such as infrastructure being underutilized, and long-term territorial integrity being compromised [1]. Because of recent developments in additive manufacturing, as described in this book, there is no fundamental reason for products to be brought to markets through centralized development, production, and distribution. Instead, products can be brought to markets through product conceptualization, product creation, and product propagation being carried out by individuals and communities in any geographical region. In this chapter, conceptualization means the forming and relating of ideas, including the formation of digital versions of these ideas (e.g., CAD); creation means bringing an idea into physical existence (e.g., by manufacturing a component); and propagation means multiplying by reproduction through digital means (e.g., through digital social networks) or through physical means (e.g., by distributed AM production). Many companies already use the Internet to collect product ideas from ordinary people from diverse locations. However, these companies are feeding these ideas
This chapter is based on VTT Working Paper 113 Digiproneurship: New types of physical products and sustainable employment from digital product entrepreneurship, by Stephen Fox & Brent Stucker. The terms “Digiproneurship” and “Factory 2.0” were first introduced in this paper, which is archived at http://www.vtt.fi/inf/pdf/workingpapers/2009/W113.pdf
I. Gibson, D.W. Rosen, and B. Stucker, Additive Manufacturing Technologies, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-1120-9_18, # Springer ScienceþBusiness Media, LLC 2010
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18 Business Opportunities and Future Directions
into the centralized physical locations of their existing business operations for detailed design and creation. Distributed conceptualization, creation, and propagation can supersede concentrated development, production, and distribution by combining AM with novel human/digital interfaces which, for instance, enable nonexperts to create and modify shapes. Additionally, body/place/part scanning can be used to collect data about physical features for input into digitally-enabled design software and onward to AM. Web 2.0 is considered as the second generation of the Internet, where users can interact with and transform web content. The advent of the Internet allowed any organization, such as a newspaper publisher, to deliver info
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