Scott Crump, the inventor of Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) technology and founder of one of 3D printing’s leading companies, has decided to retire after more than 30 years in various roles at Stratasys.
After co-founding Stratasys in 1989 with his wife Lisa, Crump has led the company as CEO, exerted his influence as CTO, most recently assumed the role of the 3D printing vendor’s Chairman, and his FDM technology has become the most used 3D printing process in the world. Held in high regard across the additive manufacturing industry, Crump was among the first five inductees into the TCT Hall of Fame back in 2017 and also made it into the Minnesota Inventors Hall of Fame three years earlier.
Speaking exclusively to TCT Magazine, Crump described his career in the 3D printing industry as a ‘fantastic ride’ but felt now was the right time to step away from Stratasys with the company ‘in good hands’ and Crump himself ready to ‘focus on other things in my personal life.’
Across nearly two hours of conversation, he also discussed the invention of a technology and founding of a company, both of which are still going strong today; the expiration of the original FDM patent, the desktop 3D printing market that ensued and the subsequent MakerBot acquisition; the penetration of the industrial markets and working with the likes of General Motors, Airbus and Boeing; and his thoughts on the future of the industry and the advice he would give to fellow innovators.
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The Crump garage: Stratasys' first office.
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Capturing the attention: Crump exhibits his rapid prototyping technology.
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Speech: Crump accepts his induction into the TCT Hall of Fame.
For most people aware of Scott Crump, the inventor and founder, his story begins in 1989 with the filing of a patent and a registration of a business. But born in the early 1950s and having picked up a mechanical engineering degree and an additional entrepreneurship qualification, by then he was already a few years into his career. And though the story of how FDM happened – the hot glue gun in the kitchen and the creation of a toy frog – is renowned throughout the additive manufacturing industry, the birth of a 3D printing technology didn’t come out of nowhere.
Crump was first involved in a start-up that made mesh net bags for toy organisations, before joining a company called Idea Incorporated which aimed to serve the semiconductor industry with a newly printed circuit board unloader. A product so in demand, it enabled the company to go public, but things would go less smoothly as the business aimed to make the next step and get its primary offering on the market.
“We took so long going through prototyping – I want to say four years – that we missed the market. We missed the market and revenues stayed flat,” Crump recalls. “There was huge pain, not just financial pain, but professional pain. It was at that point in time that I realised that people might use a rapid prototyping machine.”
Harnessing his frustration with the length of time it would typically take to go from ‘blueprint to prototype’, Crump started experimenting with plastic gels that were semi-solid, manually crafting the toy frog layer by layer with a glue gun for his daughter - “Stratasys’ first end-user”, he quips. Automating this process - and even detailing the toy frog’s creation in the original patent - Crump would go on to design seven prototype machines, each feeding spooled plastic filament through a precise temperature control liquefier to build parts, with the idea of marketing it as a rapid prototyping machine for the office at around $12,000.
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Artist rendition of Stratasys' first 3D printer.
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Stratasys' first operating 3D printer pictured in 1991.
After those seven iterations of the initial FDM platform, Stratasys had its first product on the market and Crump would count the first instance where an idea would force him out of his comfort zone. Later, he would reverse this process, buying into the idea that being out of one’s comfort zone could help generate ideas. His persistence with this technique would last the duration of his career, representing a quirk in his personality and making for a captivating anecdote at the 2016 AMUG Conference during a fireside chat with industry consultant Todd Grimm. Just 48 hours before his first day retired, Crump stood by it.
While bouts of creativity are all to do with frequencies in one’s head and drifting into daydreams, expanding one’s comfort zone is considered the key to adapting to new and awkward situations. The idea in the first instance – the invention of FDM – was enough to test Crump’s comfort zone as he entered into a ‘new reality’, while throughout his career he has felt compelled to ‘do things within the law, but outside of the rules’ to expand his comfort zone.
“You come back to work, look at an uncomfortable situation and say, ‘that’s nothing compared to running with the bulls, or staring at a shark in the cages down in Cape Town, or looking 1,000 feet down while mountain climbing and jumping from one gap to another.”
Over the last 30 years, Crump has done all of those things. Literally and figuratively.
Climbing the mountain
The beginnings of Stratasys, like many tech start-ups, emerged inside a garage, with the Crumps tinkering with their early FDM machines in the evening after working jobs that paid in the day. Stratasys’ first foothold on the way to being a company with two headquarters in Minnesota and Israel, 2,000 employees and one of the largest product portfolios in the industry was its exhibitor debut at the IMTS trade show in Chicago. Marketing efforts have evolved dramatically since this showing, but the Crumps, along with the first employee not to belong to their household, were able to coax crowds with a simple sign that read ‘LIVE Prototyping’.
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Stratasys' 3D Modeler.
As a threesome, they were selling the FDM system for more than $200,000, almost 20 times the original target price, but still, it proved popular. “Customers were willing to pay that much,” Crump says, “and soon we were doubling in size annually.” This exponential growth saw Stratasys bring in mechanical engineers, electronic engineers, software, material and integration engineers to help make further developments to the product. Some of those early hires remain with the company today.
On the face of it, it was a great start, as the new hires coincided with the first sales. But as acting Chief Financial Officer, Crump could see money was running out. His initial projection that the company would need to invest $90,000 to break even was wide of the mark by $29.9 million. Not unusual, but it did mean the company would have to look farther afield than friends and family to keep the business running.
There were conversations with 74 venture capital firms in the early 1990s, with only one agreeing to invest in an arrangement that would require Stratasys to sell five units within a year to receive $600,000 – “which we barely did” – and a further $600,000 in the second year. It tied the company over for a couple of years, but by the middle of the decade, they needed more.
“We tried to raise another five million through private placement, mostly local. We were unsuccessful,” Crump remembers. “Our alternative came down to closing the doors of Stratasys - which is a big deal, not go bankrupt, just close the doors - or we could go public.” Boldly, the company opted for the latter and did so successfully. “We pulled off a $7 million IPO on the NASDAQ back in 1994, enabling us to stabilise the business, reward employees with stock options and gain credibility with Fortune 500 companies like Ford and that really paved the way to our leadership as an industrial 3D printing company. It also allowed us to raise additional pipes, which is private that soon become public shares from the original $7 million up to over $32 million.”
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The first part to be produced on an FDM 3D printer.
The very first part to be produced on an FDM 3D printer.
With its placement on the NASDAQ stock exchange, the future of Stratasys was secure. The company was now ready to push forward, building on the beta phase that saw organisations in five sectors trial its FDM technology. In addition to an aerospace customer, there was Biomet in the medical space who was assessing the technology’s performance in the production of investment casting applications for customised hip implants. The feedback, not ‘earth-shaking’ per Crump, centred mainly on the need for faster software and higher resolution parts. In the consumer space, though, 3M was ‘extremely impressed’, and offered its expertise to allow Stratasys to characterise a superior print head and also suggested that a way to support the part as it built up might be a good idea. Stratasys then invented and patented a method of building support structures in tangent with the part. General Motors and Pittsburgh State University were the other beta users at this time.
All parts to be produced during this two-year beta phase were made out of a single wax material, and while aspects of their feedback often varied, where the beta users were in unison was on the performance of the material.
“If there was one takeaway from the whole thing,” Crump says, “we had to have a stronger basic material. We did a lot of research and came up with one that’s our biggest one today and best one, certainly for prototyping, ABS. And when we got those in, we started to get multiple orders from some of them, and really good referrals. But that took a long time. That was the longest beta we’ve ever had.”
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Early FDM part.
If time dragged while building up an extensive user base through the 90s, it flew at the turn of the century. By now, machines were printing parts at increasingly bigger sizes, starting at a few inches and ending up at a few feet through a ‘very, very hard journey’ driven by the demands of Chrysler who required structural parts. Biomet was another whose demands remained high, with Stratasys walking away ‘for a while’ from one medical product it was working on because ‘we didn’t have the structural integrity.’ The software came a long way in this time too; in addition to support generation, users wanted slicing and fixing capabilities all within one platform, and though Stratasys and 3D Systems were both making efforts to resolve these issues, Materialise emerged as the leader in this area, with companies like ObJet and EOS providing extra competition in rapid prototyping hardware. With industry developments, came application ones.
“The applications evolved 100 times more than the basic technology solutions, which was very welcome,” Crump says. “The first work in basic prototyping produced, by now, hundreds of thousands of real rapid prototyping applications in the design offices.”
Among the applications of Stratasys’ FDM technology were functional prototype parts on a car that was road-tested across the US – which earned the company CNN coverage – and a manufacturing fixture for a vacuum company that held pieces in place during assembly. Through the 2000s, Stratasys became the market leader with, at times, the best-selling technology in the 3D printing industry. But the original patent was expiring; the RepRap Project, in its aim to develop an open-source 3D printer that could print its own componentry, was gathering momentum; and soon, Crump, Stratasys and the 3D printing industry would be in uncharted territory as they rode the wave of hype.
Staring at sharks
Before the wave reached the heights it would, before Stratasys even knew it was riding atop of it, it watched as MakerBot - whose co-founder Zach Smith was also a founding member of RepRap’s Research Foundation - and the likes of Ultimaker, Aleph Objects, Tiertime and more circled. Their product offering centred on small, desktop-sized machines powered by the very technology Crump had patented 20 years prior.
The products were simple, easy to make and easy to use, not always outputting parts of the highest quality, but cheap and accessible. At a few thousand dollars each, these desktop machines would make sense for some designers, most schools and colleges, and for consumers and hobbyists, a market that was wholly untapped by Stratasys pre-2009. Stratasys and Crump not only had new competition emerging in some sectors but had been beaten to the market completely in others.
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Scott and Lisa Crump on the front cover of Minnesota Business Magazine in 2004.
By his own admission, Crump’s ego was flattered by the influx of desktop vendors using his technology to produce parts, whether it be in a design office, classroom or spare room. It helped FDM to become, by a distance, the most used 3D printing technology with 69% market share according to Statista in July 2018. And while, at the time, the emergence of these companies gave Stratasys something extra to ponder, today, Crump can look back at this moment with a wisdom only hindsight can bring.
“The invention I came up with did open the door to a whole new raft of innovative FDM-based solutions and that’s played an important role in the adoption of AM. One of the best examples is what Bre [Petis, MakerBot co-founder] did, using the basic FDM technology, without a lot of bells and whistles, using a different input from Thingiverse, a library with 2 million or more part files. That created awareness and, because of the low prices, accessibility. That success proliferated AM.”
Crump attributes the arrival of the desktop vendors, led by MakerBot, as the moment 3D printing was introduced to the world. Subsequently, there were estimations of a 3D printer in every home, the technology made the front cover of the Economist in 2011, a Netflix Original documentary aired in 2014, while the technology would even get a mention in President Obama’s State of the Union address in 2013, which Crump describes as ‘unbelievable.’ It culminated in Stratasys making an audacious move to buy out MakerBot.
“We felt that, to expand our existing business with awareness, but also expand into applications we just didn’t know about, because we didn’t have a product selling for $2,000, we [would] acquire, mostly for stock, MakerBot,” Crump explains.
What was never lost on other players in the industry, was that Stratasys, to some degree, was buying a business that only existed because of its own founder’s invention. But as Crump and Stratasys viewed it, the acquisition was made primarily because of the differences of the two companies, though since MakerBot’s reputation among the consumer market has never fully recovered in light of its decision to go closed source, their similarities have been useful in steering the company as a more professional-focused machine provider.
Scott Crump on the TCT Magazine front cover in late 2013.
“We felt that, okay it’s using our core technology, but we have a lot as a parent, we have a lot to bring, selling that into commercial industry, and then MakerBot has a huge ability to not only market - way out-market ourselves and even companies like HP at the time - but to get the products out online and leverage direct digital/ online sales which were not our forte at the time,” Crump points out. “We thought about it, studied it, but I don’t think there was hesitancy. If there was a hesitancy, it was ‘do we want to enter into a whole new segment when we were doing just fine in the other segments?’ That was the situation.
“But remember, part of my vision was to have a system selling for $12,000 or less and that was another asset that MakerBot had that we did not have. MakerBot had the ability to build something for $1,000 of raw material costs and sell it for under $2,000. That, at the time, for this industry, was unheard of.”
Through the METHOD line of 3D printers, and Stratasys' own F123 series, both MakerBot and Stratasys have products that realise Crump’s vision of a sub-$12,000 tool that can help manufacturers move through product development quicker, and produce end-use components too. MakerBot's line of METHOD machines was first unveiled to market at the end of 2018, a full five years after the Stratasys acquisition and, according to VP of Engineering Dave Veisz, represents the first example of MakerBot using its parent company’s expertise for its own product offering.
The redirection of the brand’s focus was not by chance. It speaks to the difficulty of the interim years between the peak of the hype and where the industry sits today. The technology was built up to such an extent, that it was never likely to keep pace with the wants and needs of the executives in the boardroom, nor did it materialise that there were applications aplenty for the hobbyist at home.
“On one hand,” Crump assesses, “it brought mainstream world media attention to the industry which we could never do – we did a good job, but we had a limited budget – but it also brought, in hindsight, false expectations in certain segments, namely in the consumer segment, but that will come, other things have to line up, and brought real expectations within our commercial, industrial [segments]. Since then, the industry has grown in its own natural pace and continuing to broaden the applications in a wide range of industries. And since then, the media and broader market have gained a bit better of an understanding of what the technology can do and can’t do and, importantly, began to harness the truly transformational benefits of the technology.”
Running with the bulls
While Stratasys maintained an eye on the consumer market through the hype, as well as on the education sector as it always has, progress continued, then increased, in the industrial sectors. At an increasing rate, Crump and his Stratasys colleagues were rubbing shoulders, and sometimes butting heads, with some of the biggest manufacturers in the world. Airbus and Boeing in aerospace, BAE Systems in defence, Siemens Mobility in rail and Team Penske in motor racing. In each sector, their collaboration helped to expand the application of 3D printing. Things have stepped up in commercial automotive too.
Ford Motor Company had connected with Stratasys in the 90s, a host of others – from Audi to Continental AG to Briggs Automotive Company – followed, and within the last 18 months, Crump found himself standing in the largest General Motors (GM) facility in the United States, to experience one of the highlights of his career.
Participating in a rudimentary programme, Crump and his colleagues held a seminar in the morning with around 25 GM engineering staff before splitting off into five groups and identifying, across multiple segments of a production line, where additive manufacturing could be applied. The Stratasys staff knew the tech, the GM engineers knew the vehicles, and together they started placing post-it notes where 3D printing was deemed applicable.
Crump celebrates his TCT Hall of Fame induction with industry peers in September 2017.
Crump celebrates his TCT Hall of Fame induction with industry peers in September 2017.
“I was expecting 20 to be real frank,” Crump laughs. “But the team came up with 200 valid applications, meaning there was probably 300 but some got tossed out. When we came back to the room, we put all of these up and had leaders highlight a few of them, and then in the afternoon, we switched segments, did the same thing. The excitement was unbelievable. ‘This is something totally revolutionary.’
“That was a Thursday, and I remember that, by Friday, we had a machine right there on-site, and they, not Stratasys, built their first fixture – not sexy, but very, very beneficial, and I think it was custom as I recall, and then from then on we kept doing it every day, more and more fixtures until they got more machines.”
That order, for 17 FDM machines, including Fortus 900s and 450mcs, was made at the end of 2019 to produce tooling, jigs, fixtures and other manufacturing aids at lower weight and cost. The volume of applications identified in just a single day at GM blew Crump away, but they are the types of parts that FDM has been enabling across a range of production lines in several vertical markets for decades, albeit without much fanfare. Per Crump, the availability of ‘engineering thermoplastics’, the ability to lightweight, improve, customise and turn parts around in a day, makes FDM, and 3D printing in general, ‘perfect for these types of parts’ and jigs and fixtures a ‘killer application’ for 3D printing.
More than that, they are also gateway applications. In other sectors, like the aerospace industry, companies have made good progress in their endeavours to additively manufacture end-use parts. Stratasys has contracts with the United States Air Force, NASA and Blue Origin; Marshall Aerospace & Defence and Diehl Aviation; Airbus and Boeing. Many of them harness FDM tech to churn out manufacturing aids along their production lines, while the likes of Airbus and Boeing have pushed forward into a slew of end-use applications. On Airbus’ A350 XWB aircraft, for example, there are more than 100 3D printed interior cabin parts, one of which is a curtain header manufactured by Diehl Aviation. NASA’s Orion spacecraft boasts a 3D printed docking hatch door, while Marshall has produced a bleed valve duct adapter. All are enabled by the advancements Stratasys has made in its product portfolio, namely the Fortus FDM range of printers and the ULTEM and Antero materials.
Jeffrey Sauger Jeffrey Sauger for Genreal Motors
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Stratasys FDM machines inside General Motors' facilities.
“It started with Boeing,” Crump says. “They helped and supported us for years and that gave them an early lead, where they internally built different fixtures but more importantly built parts that fly in their commercial aircraft. They started with non-functional, no airframe, but parts inside the cabin, mostly behind the wall and then at some point, Airbus got involved. Between the two companies, they gave us all the detailed feedback of what needs to occur in order to expand, part by part, the technology solutions.”
It’s this type of back and forth that has led Stratasys to develop and package up the popular Fortus 900 and ULTEM 9085 Certified Aircraft Interior Parts product and will push the company to continue in this vein. “I could go on for a day on the different demand that customers had,” Crump says, referring just to his conversations with early customers, and not the hundreds that have followed. The length of time that would take is incalculable. Crump’s own demands of the industry as he prepares to depart the industry, while fewer in number and quicker to cite, may be equal in significance.
The key, Crump believes, is automation. “I think when technologies automate, they take off,” he justifies. “When you’re manual, you sell a few machines, when you automate, especially if it’s at the right price, it’s a game-changer. Customers don’t want what the industry has today. I think what we have is good, but it’s not what the customers want. They want full automation. CAD to a finished part in the push of a button in quantities up to, probably right now, 10,000-part lot numbers.”
Stratasys' Cloud9.
Stratasys’ own efforts to achieve this resulted in what Crump refers to as Cloud Nine, but what Stratasys marketed in 2017 as the Continuous Build 3D Demonstrator, of which 20 beta platforms are currently out in the field. Crump also commends 3D Systems’ Figure Four platform, which he believes demonstrates ‘good automation’ but, like the Continuous Build Demonstrator, still ‘has a way to go’. While looking to the future, he outlines lightweight end of arm effectors for robots as big application opportunity and describes the 3D printing of ‘bigger production parts’ as an emerging field. Meanwhile, he predicts Stratasys spin-off Evolve Additive will have big success using its ability to build layers in seconds to facilitate short-run production of parts and suggests, FDA reimbursement dependant, medical applications like diagnosis devices and pre-op models could be the biggest growth area for additive companies in terms of revenue.
He posits these thoughts as a veteran of an industry he helped to build, as someone whose confidence in 3D printing remains as strong today as it did in 1989, and as an inventor whose idea to build parts layer by layer is now the most adopted and used technology of its kind. Crump has seen the peaks and troughs of the additive manufacturing market, knows all-too-well the pros, the cons, the expectations and the barriers. And so, he feels well-equipped to stress the importance of continuous improvement and point out where that can energy can be focused.
But his final words of his final on-the-record interview as a Stratasys employee are delivered with more reflection than foresight. Before stepping back from the endeavour that has defined his career and making the most of his retirement, Crump offers guidance for fellow innovators, inventors and executives in the industry.
In some order, he lists: “Acknowledge the fact that, somehow, someone has got to pay for the early investment, you probably can’t do it for nothing.
“You also have to acknowledge as an inventor or innovator, it’s not about the product, it’s not about the technology, it’s about the team – picking the right ones that form the right culture, not necessarily your culture, but a healthy culture.
“Focus on the need, not the want.
“Don’t be cheap – pay people what they’re worth, share the wealth; if you can make them, having proper access to some legitimate stock options is a very powerful tool to keep people focused.
“And persistence may be as important as the idea.”
