When Charles Hull first successfully fired a UV light to cure and bond a photopolymer and make a 3D object, he hadn’t just invented a technology. He had, unknowingly, like many founders before and after him, in the middle of a lab in 1983, ignited the beginning of an entire industry.
Three years later, Charles – Chuck, or ‘Father of 3D printing’ will also work – went on to establish 3D Systems and commercialise the technology known today as stereolithography (SLA). In the four decades since, that process has been applied to satellites in orbit, millions of custom-fit dental aligners, life-changing medical models, and just about every complex geometry, personalised product, or rapid iteration in between.
Since Chuck stepped down as CEO in 2003, three people have taken on the job of steering additive manufacturing’s (AM) original ship. Jeffrey Graves is the man currently at the helm and, as he tells me during a conversation in Boston, is very aware of the responsibility that legacy places on his shoulders – as well as the enormous opportunity.
“The direction 3D printing was going in, I thought was quite clear,” Graves says of his early view that digital manufacturing, specifically 3D printing, is playing a key
role in the transformation of manufacturing. “It’s a real manufacturing process, not a laboratory novelty. And that was absolutely true. What I thought intuitively has also come to pass – that it’s becoming more application driven. What I didn’t anticipate was this economic cycle that we’ve gone through, which has been painful. And interestingly, it’s been painful for the whole industry.”
Graves didn’t step into the job at the smoothest time. It was May 2020, in the throes of the pandemic, but AM was undergoing a mini renaissance as 3D printers emerged as a solution in times of supply chain crisis and urgency. Then, the bubble burst, inflation became a problem and customers responded with caution around capital investments. Geopolitical conflicts, wars, tariffs, if you had it on your ‘industry challenges’ bingo card, it probably happened. But six years on, in a quiet meeting room located where the industry’s biggest players are gathering for North America’s largest industrial 3D printing event, Graves tells me, there’s a clear shift happening.
“Tougher times bring discipline. They separate out companies that can make it versus ones that can’t,” Graves says. “The pressure on the whole industry has caused companies all to figure out, how are we going to make money? How does our process lead to a profitable, sustainable business rather than ‘look at all this cool stuff I can do’?”
It’s an increasingly familiar realisation. For an industry once carried by its sheer ‘cool’ factor, the notion that leading with the technology first, rather than the stuff it enables, isn’t going to be sustainable, is finally coming to the surface. For 3D Systems, the last five years have been focused on making clear decisions around R&D spending – which, Graves says, accounted for around a fifth of its sales when he arrived – and being clear on where its strengths lie in the industries it serves. As Graves recalls, they “sucked it up”, cut back where necessary and invested in a series of new platforms and application development work. It’s paying off and, most importantly, users are catching up too.
“Forging, machining and casting metals, have been around for hundreds of years. 3D printing has been around in the lab for maybe 40 years, but in production for maybe less than 20,” Graves explains. “I’ve been through this before. It’s taken designers and our customers time to say, ‘This is real manufacturing’, for them to take it seriously and incorporate it in their workflows and their design philosophy. I knew when I came in, directionally, that was going to happen. I had no way of knowing how fast. The economy has slowed that down, but the direction is the same and it’s unstoppable now.”
He compares it to the humble calculator when he was coming out of school. The old guys were happy with their slide rules and reluctant to change. It took fresh blood to come in and say ‘This is how we’re going to do things.’ It’s why he admires companies like SpaceX that are willing to take risks and do things differently.
“There’s room for younger companies to come along and try new things, adopt new tools. They’ll be the winners of the world.”
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Discipline and drive
This year marks Graves’ 25th year as CEO of a public company. Coming up, his degrees were rooted in engineering, and he loves the science behind AM technology. He could talk for hours about its applications in healthcare (we talked about it for an hour during a panel session earlier that day). He calls himself an
‘extreme additive optimist’ but he’s no evangelist. “It’s not a cure all, it doesn’t solve every problem in the world,” he says. He has no interest in spending time on applications that aren’t driven by a true customer need, and he’s very clear on the ones that are. Orthopaedics, dental, aerospace and defence are what he considers to be “highly defendable markets” for 3D Systems technology to scale. So that’s where it’s concentrating its efforts.
“You tend to take fewer risks, but you tend also to make probably bigger bets on those fewer risks,” Graves says of this steadfast vision. “It’s forced us, in a good way, to be very line of sight to certain markets and applications.”
One of those applications is dentures. There are thought to be up to a billion people in need of dentures across the globe, and it’s ripe to adopt 3D printing. In dental, 3D Systems’ technology is already being used to print a million custom aligners daily. But it’s taken another two years to develop its NextDent Jetted Denture Solution, which 3D Systems believes to be the industry’s first monolithic, multi-material jetted denture workflow, and was recently certified under the European Union Medical Device Regulation. With figures estimating that up to 90% of dentures produced today are made through analogue processes, the opportunity for 3D printing to become the go-to method of production, Graves believes, is huge.
“The patient comes in, you scan them, you give them something that fits perfect, looks beautiful, and it’s at a fraction of the cost,” Graves says. “It meets every requirement. I’ve got 100% certainty that 3D printed dentures are a winner.”
Orthopaedics is another. 3D Systems’ facility in Littleton, Colorado is where its thousands of patient cases come through, and it’s a source of inspiration for Graves as each engineer’s computer screen illuminates a very real life where this technology is having an impact.
“You see their skeleton in a three-dimensional X-ray and to think that person in two days will be on the operating table and that’ll be repaired,” he says. “So, on your worst day, you think, at least I did something good for humanity today.”
The greater the impact, though, the greater the challenges, and reimbursement is perhaps the biggest there is in this field. The proof is all there, the patient benefit is undeniable, but successfully placing that knowledge into a healthcare system where the margins are almost zero, requires a careful balance – “a magic formula” as Graves puts it – between cost and value. Yes, it might be more expensive but it’s going to make doctors more productive, it’s going to require less hospital visits, it’s going to deliver better patient outcomes.
“Application by application, you work your way through the body and that’s going to happen at some point. Just about everything related to your bones can be 3D printed.”
And then some. Graves has bold ambitions for where 3D Systems technology could be applied across healthcare. In addition to the 3,000,000+ medical devices manufactured and 400,000+ patient-specific surgical cases it has already produced, 3D Systems is at the forefront of AM’s next frontier – regenerative medicine.
“Your skeleton suit at some point is never going to wear out. We’re going to replace it, rebuild it, repair it, whatever it is. That’s coming.”
That might sound farfetched but since 2017 3D Systems has been working with United Therapeutics (UT) to develop functioning 3D printed organs and tissues through a combination of bioprinting, biocompatible materials, and patient-derived cells. 3D Systems is already working on lung scaffolds for UT which, Graves believes, could be a game changer for the 200,000 people in the United States currently in need of lung transplants.
“We’re getting closer to being able to do this,” he says. “In the not too distant future you will print organs on demand, tissue on demand, bones on demand. You can rebuild someone’s body. Our goal is to keep expanding in healthcare.”
Regulation will, of course, be a big hurdle here, and he feels it’s going to take a big push from the AM industry to actively put their heads – and data – together to accelerate the adoption of AM in healthcare systems.
“The level of competition in this industry, dating back to the eighties has been very
destructive,” Graves explains. “To prove it to the regulatory bodies, you have to have an enormous amount of data. That’s where an industry can come together and prove with data that certain things lead to better outcomes. We have to get better at that.”
Right next to 3D Systems’ healthcare facility in Colorado, another industry is also preparing for its next frontier. Direct metal printing is being adopted by aerospace and defence customers to build next-gen flight systems that leverage exotic materials to help them stay strong and fly fast. 3D Systems is currently in the middle of a multi-phase multi-million-dollar program funded by the U.S. Air Force to build a laser powder-bed fusion demonstration system in San Diego for highefficiency, large-scale metal part production. This year it began adding new space to its Littleton facility as part of plans to enhance its Aerospace & Defense Application Center of Excellence, where the new systems will be put to work making parts.
“My commitment to them is, when that’s finished, we will design and build a commercial printer from that in the United States,” Graves explains.
The focus on these three pillars has taken reflection and commitment. Discipline means owning your strengths, but it also means being bold enough to let go of everything else. Graves is open about the latter. He tells the story of a meeting early on with a ‘big aerospace customer’ which had expressed a desire for a multi-platform, hardware agnostic software that could run mixed printer fleets. So, they listened and went out and bought cloud-based Manufacturing Operating System (MOS) company Oqton in a $180 million deal. But there were two big problems. The economy dipped, so customers didn’t want to buy enterprise software, coupled with the endemic AM industry problem of people not working together – who would want to sell 3D Systems’ branded software for their own machines? So, last year, it made the strategic decision to sell off its Oqton and 3DXpert platforms and focus its development efforts on its proprietary 3D Sprint software.
“I grew up at General Electric and learned a long time ago, you’ve got to know your business model and you’ve got to know what you’re good at – and what you’re distinctively good at and what you’re just okay at,” Graves tells me. “We are excellent with the science of 3D printing. We’re excellent at applications. We design really good machines, we’re good in manufacturing.”
That distinction, Graves believes, is particularly important as Western OEMs face incoming competition from low-cost industrial systems made in China.
“We’re never going to be the low-cost guy. So, I said just be the good, high-quality guy. And we’ll work on cost every day. But we’ll distinguish ourselves on the technology and on our knowledge of applications to get into these high value markets.”
It’s interested in the economics of AM and what the technology can deliver. 3D Systems’ new flagship system, the SLA 825 Dual, is a dual-laser production platform that promises 25% faster build speeds compared to its predecessor and up to 30% faster speeds versus competitive systems.
“The precision that machine offers, the size and scale and the ultimate throughput because of the dual laser capability, makes the economics excellent.”
Building on a legacy
During our two-hour conversation, Graves refers back to Chuck several times. He admires his humility and says that core culture of “people who love the application of 3D printing” remains. But Graves is also very aware of the perception of 3D Systems. It was, after all, a former CEO who heralded the short-lived dream of a 3D printer in every home. At times, as the ‘OG’ AM company, it might have felt it had all of the answers, and Graves experienced the tailwinds of that when he began meeting with customers who had been left with a bad taste in their mouths from what they’d perceived as overconfidence 10 years prior.
“I think there’s a big degree of humbleness that you have to have because it’s not about providing the technology, it’s how people use it,” Graves explains. “That’s the magic. We bring a lot of technical talent, but that’s got to turn into something useful. That’s the winning attitude to have. It’s the biggest change that I’ve tried to drive in the company. I wouldn’t trade our legacy for anything. But there’s bad sometimes with the good and you’ve got to filter that out if you can.”
It comes with the territory. The volatility and contraction in the AM industry has forced restructuring measures over the last five years, and Graves has been in the room during multiple rounds of layoffs, which he says, humbly, he views as a failure as a CEO. But he believes the industry is turning a corner and on a path to growth. He is certain we’ll find that in the maturation of healthcare, in the incoming milestones in bioprinting, and in metal 3D printing for applications of national security.
“I think for certain applications it’ll be the dominant way things are made,” he says. “Everything in your mouth will soon be dominated by 3D printing. I think a lot of aerospace stuff will be dominated by 3D printing because it’s so efficient with very little waste.”
It’s all right there on the cusp. And Graves is confident that 3D Systems’ legacy, the hardwon lessons, and clear vision will provide the resilience to succeed.
“It’s a true honour to lead a company like this,” Graves concludes. “There are tough days as a CEO and there’s a lot of people to make happy to keep the business going, but it’s a blessed job. You do good things for people, and it’s really cool science. To me, as an engineer, it’s heaven.”
