3D Printing To Dwarf Subprime
Global manufacturing goes distributed hyperlocal
California manufacturers can undercut China with the miracle of 3D printing and it’s going to be more disruptive than the movable type was to the last millennium. BRIC economies and shipping networks are going to be displaced from the critical path as manufacturing goes hyperlocal.
Imagine on this Black Friday if you went to a children’s toy store that did all of its manufacturing on site from a single 3D printer. Plastic resin goes in the back door, toys go on shelf, and are sold out the front door. There would be no need to travel to China 9 months ahead of time, negotiate with a factory, arrange for slow transport to the US by boat, clear customs, feed your large order into a distribution network, and truck it to suburban shopping malls. What if you built an entire mall of stores that could 3D print nearly every item sold?
Consider a more impactful example than $10 plastic toys: what if I could take apart an entire car, scan the pieces, and 3D print most of a new one for $6,000 plus the cost of assembly? What if I put those plans on the Internet for free?
3D printing the finished product has advantages in speed of product development, batch size, and could be 90% cheaper. There are two critical themes here. First, places like China have made 30 year investments in manufacturing capacity and transportation infrastructure. The bonds backing these investments are going to follow the path of securitized subprime loans and fall precipitously in value as it is realized these factories will not achieve their planned yield and useful life. Second, this is how manufacturing will return to the United States and create jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities for every creative person. No longer will you need to be an expert in global procurement to do product development. You can build anything you want to sell without having a partner overseas, or worse being forced to move your manufacturing overseas for cost reasons.
New players will not have to start from scratch in product design and manufacturing. All the innovative software we use daily is built on the shoulders of giants with open source operating systems and libraries. An Internet hub of plans and instructions for 3D printed items and pieces will form. Derivative works will be the new normal in products we buy.
Who is going to be the Sean Parker of 3D printing? There will be a courageous public leader of this already started movement that will bear the full brunt of powerful industrial companies wrath. They will use armies of lawyers and claim copyright and patent infringement. There will be no way to contain the movement much like digital music before it. I believe it’s going to eventually cause a seismic scale adjustment in global trade that exceeds the 2008 subprime loan crisis.
