Read time: 13 mins.
Key highlights:
- State of play: The AM trajectory per the Gartner Hype Cycle.
- Don't believe the hype: The impact of inflated expectations.
- A measured optimism: Insights on how AM can get back on track.
This article was first published via the Additive Insight newsletter on July 4th, 2024.
A handful of bankruptcies, half a dozen stock exchange noncompliance notices, and just the 73 mergers and acquisitions to be reported by TCT Magazine since the onset of COVID-19.
Though once known as rapid prototyping, the additive manufacturing market has existed for 40 years. In that context, though, it would be fair to say it’s currently in a state of flux.
The post-COVID years have not been smooth sailing for many of the industry’s suppliers, nor has it been to a few users who had built their business models around additive technology. It has led to much introspection.
Like in any industry, there are optimists with a constant sunny disposition, and there are pessimists who are much harder to impress. Or as Nano Dimension CEO Yoav Stern suggested during RAPID + TCT’s Executive Perspectives series in LA last week, there are “pessimists who think it can’t get any worse, and optimists who say, ‘of course it can!’”
So, as we reach the halfway point of 2024, it’s time for some reflection. It’s time to examine the progress being made in the AM space. It’s time to ask where are we and where are we going?
Inside the cycle
To do that, we’re going to use the Gartner Hype Cycle, an oft-cited graph that helps chart the usually non-linear progression of nascent technologies.
In Gartner’s own words, its Hype Cycle provides a ‘graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities.’ The Cycle is made up of five phases – Innovation Trigger; Peak of Inflated Expectations; Trough of Disillusionment; Slope of Enlightenment; Plateau of Productivity – and it is generally thought that it takes a technology around five years to reach the end. 3D printing, though, is an outlier.
Its Innovation Trigger came way back in the 80s and 90s when the likes of Chuck Hull, Scott Crump, Ely Sachs and Carl Deckard were leading the inventions of some of AM’s most used printing processes. As a technology used for rapid prototyping, 3D printing was comfortably in the plateau of productivity by the turn of the century. But its journey as a manufacturing technology has been less straightforward.
The expiration of many of the early patents blew a breath of fresh air into the industry, allowing more companies to innovate on top of an innovation, build their own companies, sell their own machines, communicate their rather lofty visions. A printer in every home, then in every room, and so on. This, AM’s peak of inflated expectations, proceeded the industry’s current landscape.
“All the technology exists, these machines seem pretty capable,” LatticeRobot Chairman Blake Courter said on episode #158 of the Additive Insight podcast, “yet how do you practically put them to work?”
That practical putting of the technology to work is where a technology and its industry enter the slope of enlightenment – a slower growth period whereby the technology and suitable applications become more understood and new generations of product begin to emerge from the technology providers. At this stage, it is expected that some conservative companies remain cautious. Their eventual adoption and application of the technology would symbolise that the plateau of productivity is being reached.
The state of play
So, where is additive manufacturing on this Hype Cycle?
Per Lin Kayser’s recent TCT Magazine column, the answer isn’t the one most want to hear. He argues that the economics of industrial 3D printing have left additive manufacturing at the ‘bottom of the Gartner Hype Cycle.’
He isn’t the only one who thinks so.
“Most people would agree,” additive manufacturing consultant Jonathan Rowley said on episode #158 of the Additive Insight podcast, “that we are now in the trough of disillusionment, probably fairly near the bottom, if not slightly creeping up the other side.”
“We’re in the trough,” Tali Rosman, another industry consultant, told TCT. “Some customers are savvier or have enough experience, they’re getting to the slope of enlightenment, but as a whole, that’s where we are.”
