3D printing in Nepal — notes from the field

There is something irrepressible about Kathmandu. Rubble from the earthquake still lines its busy streets. Bikes, cars and buses bob and weave around one another, wheezing fumes into a heady mix of haze and dust, making Kathmandu one of the world’s most polluted cities.

Everywhere you look, smiling faces offer the warmest welcome, innovative thinking and tough resilience. During our stay in Kathmandu, no place embodied the best of this culture like Communitere Nepal — a not-for-profit where entrepreneurs and innovators get together to rebuild lives and solve gnarly problems.

Communitere Nepal

We spent time at Communitere working with the supply and demand parts of the 3D printing ecosystem to determine the aspects of the business model that would be most useful to work on.

We paired up as archetypes from the ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ side of the business model to get a total understanding of unmet needs and challenges

We left our time with four key areas of focus as we prototype the business model of 3D printing in Nepal:

1. The filament supply chain

One of the key benefits of hyper-local production of goods through 3D printing is that it shortens the supply chain, making products more readily available where they’re needed without the costs or time associated with importing those goods. But often the filament for the 3D printers is expensive and time consuming to import.

How might we lower the cost of the filament we use, without compromising quality of consistency? There are a number of areas for us to explore, test and learn about here, like upcycling waste into filament or considering ways to reduce import tax.

Ran from Field Ready at Nepal Innovation Lab

2. Ideal use cases

3D printing technology is still incredibly frontier, the printers themselves still take time to print objects and it’s difficult to get consistent quality standards print after print. To that end, comparing 3D printing with the established manufacturing industry is not a realistic comparison, because printing at that scale is clearly not the ideal use case for 3D printing today.

What’s the ideal use case for 3D printing? Some early areas for us to test, explore and learn more about include the production of small batch, bespoke products and prototypes for bigger orders that may be fulfilled through traditional production capabilities.

An umbilical cord clamp currently takes half an hour to print and over two weeks to import

3. The business model

For this business to flourish, the supply and demand side of our 3D printing ecosystem need to get a good deal. With lengthy production times it’s crucial to find a balance where the makers feel it’s worth their time and buyers get good value for money.

Making the Makernet at Nepal Innovation Lab

4. The Makernet

The Makernet will of course, be a key development in realising the potential of this business model. Once live, it will serve as a platform that connects the buyers with the makers. For now though, we’re doing that matchmaking in the most analogue way, by bringing the buyers and makers together in real life to thrash out and co-create the the order and its fulfilment.

Up next…

In the next phase of our work we’ll be prototyping the business model by fulfilling an order through 3D printing. This will allow us to test the use case, the cost, value and viability of the business model and feed what we learn into our next sprint* of work.

*Frontier Technology Livestreaming follows agile and adaptive methodologies. For our programme, a sprint is defined as the smallest amount of work we can do that will result in a useful feedback loop. Typically, this is one cycle of building, measuring and learning.