Are the opportunities for farmers and other EO data users materialising yet?
11.04.2025
For this blog published together with our custom search, analytics and competitive intelligence partner IALE see here.
How Is (Your) 3D Printing Coming Along?
10 years ago, we published a blog on 3D Printing (3DP) when we, like many, believed its full potential might materialise over the following decade in many industries. Through recent work for our clients, we had an opportunity to look at the overall state of the technology again when we investigated its application in two very different areas, namely the food sector and the construction industry (https://www.food.gov.uk/research/emerging-challenges-and-opportunities/3d-printing-technologies-in-the-food-system-for-food-production-and-packaging?print=1).
As was the case a decade ago, 3DP receives still regular media attention, and still there is talk about how the technology will revolutionise the future of design and manufacture of all kinds of products by enabling de-centralised production, new business models and novel products at scale. However, now, as was the case for the past three decades, the anticipated revolutionary potential of 3DP is still very slow in manifesting at any substantial scale in most sectors where some 3DP has taken hold. Yes, the different printing modalities, such as powder jetting, laser sintering, extrusion-based varieties, vat polymerisation, and a few others, as well as software and printers have technically improved over the past decade. And yes, the variety and quality of printable materials and printed products has increased, from tissues printed with live cells to little dragons printed from spinach (to entice children) or cycle bridges from steel or concrete, or even (small) buildings. Application areas such as prototyping and small-edition manufacture of bespoke decorative items and 3D printing of spare parts in the car and consumer goods industries have become more mature and have grown somewhat in these early occupied niche markets. Over the past decade it has also become clear that for the foreseeable future it will be the B2B and 3DP services sectors that will contribute most to the growth of the technology, rather than consumer at-home printing.
However, the same, mostly technical, limitations of 3DP that were identified 10 years ago still persist and appear to keep 3DP on that slow trajectory of market penetration it has been on ever since its inception. And still, considerable expertise and skill are required to 3D-print products with consistent quality. So, what has happened to the ‘revolution’ that 3DP was anticipated to deliver – or, have we just missed it while it was happening?
Sure, most novel technologies must go through the hype cycle and need time to establish dominant designs and implementations, followed by the necessary investments to grow into a significant market that adds enough value to justify further investment for growth. This is particularly true for any hardware-based novel technology, a fact we sometimes forget when becoming used to software-based innovation success stories. Also, history tells us that most ‘revolutionary’ technologies have taken many decades to grow and spread to a significant extent, often with substantial, long-term government support, before they truly transformed industries, business models and societies. And indeed, it appears that such government support to further develop 3DP has over the past decade increased in many parts of the world. Some funding programs to support R&D and scale-up activities for the emerging 3DP ‘industry’ are now in place in the US, EU, and parts of Asia. Hence the perception is that 3DP needs still more help to “really” take off. Possibly over the next decade?
To understand some of the reasons for the slow evolution of 3DP, let’s have a look at two examples we have encountered in our recent work in the food and construction sectors. Although they are vastly different in terms of what is printed, namely edible ingredients at a scale of a few centimetres, and concrete at a scale of several metres, overall, their technological evolution seems to be at a very similar stage at present. In both areas 3DP enthusiasts started to explore the possibilities of 3DP in earnest around 15 years ago.
In the food sector generic printers were initially used to print complex decorative shapes using chocolate or sugar, and a small market for bespoke decorative, edible elements now exists, mainly in the confectionary and fine dining sectors. To cater to these markets, a handful of food printers are now on offer, mainly via B2B services, and a small number of specialist food printing businesses offer services for example for special events or in collaboration with restaurants as part of a dining experience. There was also interest by big food manufacturers to explore the technology, and bespoke, more complex pasta shapes are now offered in small editions by one of the world’s largest pasta makers, Barilla, using 3DP. In both sectors, food and construction, academic R&D has increased rapidly over the past decade, and markedly so over the past five years, and has given rise to a number of startups that are offering products and services in both sectors. Equally, many 3DP businesses have failed in the past decade often due to lack of a viable business model, difficulties to scale, or simply not enough demand for 3D printed ware.
What seems to be a recent trend in the food sector is a shift from using 3DP for the production of complex shapes to applications that create novel or desired textures, hence moving away from the original focus of the technology on 3D shapes. The cultured (lab-grown) meat and plant-based meat sectors are examples, where derivative technologies of 3DP, such as multi-nozzle extrusion printing, are used to improve the texture of meat substitute products. Also generating texturised, printed food for patients with difficulties swallowing regular food is an area that is actively investigated by academic research, and first products have been tested for use in hospitals and care homes. This shows that 3DP can act as an enabling technology in unexpected niche application areas where it then can evolve into new directions.
In the construction sector 3DP was first used to create complex shapes for decorative building elements, such as façade panels or internal wall elements. More recently, the printing of some load-bearing elements has been achieved. For example, the main parts of a cycle bridge in the Netherlands were 3D printed off-site followed by assembly at location(https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/worlds-longest-3d-printed-concrete-pedestrian-bridge-unveiled-in-nijmegen-195951/ ). A pedestrian bridge over a canal in Amsterdam made of 3D printed steel was relocated after a few years in use (https://parametric-architecture.com/mx3d-bridge-removed-after-permit-expires-and-will-be-relocated/?srsltid=AfmBOoqbLZZeEkOUvvTzOzvTaFbIIbN9s1Ddacztj1nDAlghOMbr4-S0 ). Entire small buildings have been printed with up to 3 floors in a umber of countries over the past decade (https://builtin.com/articles/3d-printed-house ). However, 3D printed load-bearing concrete parts still need to be joined together and integrated into the main construction framework of a building using additional construction techniques to achieve required structural integrity and safety standards. 3DP of concrete on building sites might appear at first simple, as only one well understood ‘ingredient’ (concrete) is used. However, the intricacies of optimising the printing process on a construction site are far from trivial. The printing speed, concrete ingredient proportions, the necessary addition of reinforcement structures for tensile strength (such as steel bars and meshes), the drying speed of concrete under various weather conditions and many other factors that vary from one construction site and project to the next, all need to be very well aligned and optimised. Moreover, the simple fact that tensile strength is hard to achieve in a structure that is built up of layers with each inter-layer connection being an area of physical weakness, poses limitations in principle. Hence, the off-site printing under controlled external conditions of (mainly decorative) non-load bearing construction elements is the market segment that is more likely here to stay and grow.
In both sectors, regulators have recently started to watch these emerging 3DP markets more closely. While 3D printed foods and construction elements are not yet regulated specifically anywhere in the world, lawmakers are currently preparing to develop regulatory frameworks that should set standards and prevent potential harm to consumers through products that might pose risks specifically due to the fact that they were produced via 3DP. These risks can in the case of foods arise from the requirement of complex ingredient mixtures (‘food inks’), including ‘healthy’ vegetable paste, to be highly processed and to contain high levels of additives to achieve printability in the first place. Or certain types of food printers might become potential sources of contaminants when not used and maintained appropriately. 3D printing of concrete is now investigated by regulators and standards certification bodies with regards to the many safety and quality standards that apply in the construction industry to the safe use of concrete (past failures to comply with these have just recently been much in the media, with the RAAC concrete scandal closing schools and hospitals across the UK). Such regulatory initiatives at a mid to late Technology Readiness Level (around TRL 7) can be very helpful to shape and support an emerging technology market by making sure that products are actually viable and safe to use, so that consumers gain trust and buy them. As a result, markets can evolve towards benchmarks and investors can invest in more robust technology, supporting further market growth. Until the positive impact that regulation can make on the 3D printing of food and concrete, however, some more time will pass. Maybe time during which some more of the general technical challenges of 3DP might be fixed?
Persisting challenges
What are these challenges that have made 3DP overall a slowly evolving technology? Our perception of 3DP is often shaped by a vision that appeals so much to our magical thinking, namely, to just press a button and have something, often with a complex shape, materialise effortlessly. It is however the technical fundamentals of the 3DP process itself that bring with them some inherent weaknesses that will almost certainly not change any time soon and hence make sweeping and rapid breakthrough revolutions across industries rather unlikely. These inherent challenges may sound by now almost trivial, but are worth remembering when next time considering a 3DP solution to a problem at scale, or wondering why we are still not printing our next pair of trainers at home:
- Input materials always need considerable R&D efforts to make sure materials are optimised for both the printing process and the exact specifications of the desired end product. This means, first optimising the materials to a certain printer type so they can be printed at all and then work out exact printer parameters to find the right trade-off between printability and the performance criteria the product needs to fulfil. This also means, that ideally, every material might need its own optimised printer hardware, a trend that has clearly happened. And, thirdly, it means that robust composite products made from more than one material will almost be impossible to produce via a single 3D printing process.
- Any layer-by-layer deposition method will always have the challenge of creating a site of mechanical weakness and inhomogeneity between layers that will affect mechanical strength and other properties of the product.
- Although driven by digitally controlled machines, layer-by-layer deposition methods are ‘serial’ and ‘analogue’ technologies in which a material is deposited one point on the print path after the other (although in a continuous manner). This will always make 3DP a relatively slow technology.
- The additive nature (point by point and layer by layer) will always impact reproducibility of printed products as even minute fluctuations in the input material, the external environment, or operating conditions can cause irregularities in the final product. Hence, 3DP is still best used in well controlled industrial settings.
- Given these inherent physical challenges, 3DP will in most contexts face difficulties reaching the economies of scale necessary for economic viability. Hence business models need to factor this in from the start when setting out to offer products, as initial market size and ways of making profits will always be impacted by above limitations.
While we can expect that over the next decade some of these challenges might become reduced somewhat due to incremental technical improvements in some 3DP application areas, they are at the very core of the technical principles that are the foundation of 3DP. Hence, for businesses wanting to set out using the technology, they need to keep these challenges in mind from the start when designing their business models optimised for their respective niche markets. And surely enough, more niche markets will emerge in the future based on improved 3DP technology. In another decade, when we might wonder about the revolutionary breakthroughs that 3DP should have delivered by then, we might find again that 3DP has already become an established technology in some industries – and that the revolution has already happened, without us noticing, one niche market at the time. However, we might still not 3D-print our dinner in the kitchen of our 3D printed home.
A Systems Approach to Shared Thinking and Planning
Organisations increasingly launch change programs to adapt to rapid changes in their external environment in an increasingly uncertain reality. However, there are two strong forces that often work against such programs:
- Human innate resistance to change
- A high level of volatility and accelerated speed of change in the environment
By the time a change program is officially completed, the environment in which the business or organisation functions has already changed. This is exacerbated by the fact that many aspects of the change are often forced upon employees. They often do not understand the premises, or do not feel part of or agree with a course of action, and therefore do not integrate/adopt the requirements of new ways of working in their routine. This often leads to different levels of adaptability between divisions in an organisation, or outright conflict in and between teams. Traditional change management programs often fail in addressing the nuances of dynamic human factors of change.
The “Deep Change” approach brings people, processes, and the volatile external environment together in a harmonious manner, based on deep insights into the human need for transparency, trust and ability to have a voice.
To implement “Deep Change” in organisations, leading to a system shift, people need to first be made aware of the unknown unknowns in their relationships with each other in their teams, as well as within the organisation and with the process of change itself. Our uniquely designed workshops bring about such awareness in all involved, by taking teams and organisations through the journey of “Deep Change” independent of issue, industry or geography.
Our process is designed to help you through the perilous convergence of resistance to change, volatile external environments and pressure for a system shift in your organisation. We empower your organisation to find the shared thinking, language, and strategy to move from paralysis to proactive anticipation, so you can address new challenges and capitalise on new opportunities.
Read the case study here: https://www.camrosh.com/strategy-in-action/
Get in touch to find out how we can help you info@camrosh.com
Understanding complexity should be on top of your agenda
Pantea Lotfian PhD, Camrosh Ltd.
The process of innovation is usually considered a complicated affaire. A lot of uncertainty and unknowns characterise the early stages and as the innovation process is followed systematically, it becomes refined, and gradually the best options are selected, details emerge and innovation becomes a reality in the form of a new process, product, strategy etc. However, there is something else happening in parallel with this, which we rarely pay attention to. Innovation is complex not complicated and is becoming increasingly so. This is because as we move through the process the environment is continuously changing and as the innovation is taking shape the impact of a changing environment will nudge innovation from being a complicated process to complex process. It is crucial to be able to identify when we are facing complexity instead of something that is just complicated.
We use the words complex and complicated in different contexts on a daily basis, and often interchangeably. However, there are crucial differences between complicated and complex:
A complicated system has many components that can have very many interactions with each other. However, these interactions all follow a specific pattern. This makes it possible to predict how a complicated system behaves. For example the majority of transport systems we use today such as a cars, trains, ships, airplanes and spacecraft are complicated systems with varying degrees of complicatedness, however due to the existence of predictable and purposefully designed components and their well understood interactions in the process of their respective functioning, operating them becomes possible with a high degree of predictability and safety.
Complex systems are also multi component and may behave in patterned ways, however; their interactions are continuously changing. The properties of a complex system depends on three elements:
- the number of potentially interacting elements
- the interdependence level of connectedness of those elements
- the level of heterogeneity of the components
Complexity of a system increases with the increase in any one, or all of the above mentioned factors: multiplicity, interdependence and heterogeneity. The implication is that in complex systems the same starting conditions as in a complicated system will produce very different outcomes, depending on the interactions of the units in the system. This makes such systems emergent; that means they can show unexpected behaviours resulting from the internal reactions between units or interactions with the environment. Examples of complex systems are financial markets or an air traffic control system. Nature as a whole is obviously the ultimate complex system, but here I would like to limit the discussion to man made complex systems.
The problem starts by the very act of trying to create a reproducible process within a naturally emergent system where we try to reduce the complexity to manageable complicatedness through creating boundaries based on our assumptions.
In order to be able to create anything at all we have to make assumptions and set boundaries; however, in order to be successful when dealing with complexity before making our first assumption we have to be aware that we are dealing with complexity rather than just something complicated that might have some underlying blueprint that we might figure out at some point.
Why does this matter?
This may all sound a bit philosophical, but often businesses try to increase the pace of innovation by increasing the variety and number of their products or services. This leads then, to the surprise of the keen innovators, to stagnation and decrease of profitability. When the reasons for declining profitability despite innovation initiatives is investigated, the root cause is often identified as increased complexity within the organisation, particularly in operations and as a result unanticipated rising costs. Bad economic data, overoptimistic sales expectations and entrenched managerial assumptions are also causes of the spread of complexity through the organisation. The effects of these factors are interrelated and compound the resulting complexity in unexpected and nonlinear ways.
Increasing complexity also carries other challenges namely unintended consequences, both positive and negative, and difficulty in making sense of a situation.
Unintended consequences are mainly the result of interactions in parts/events in the system, without being initially considered or intently initiated. This often happens when products and services are developed without a full understanding of the environment, which sometimes is not fully accessible .
Environment here stands for variables such as technology and design aspects of a product/service, customer preferences and unexpected behaviour, regulatory and legislative changes and sometimes lack of change in regulation, which can prevent the use of advanced technologies in a context based on trust from customers, such as aviation or medicine. Another example of where complexity can be a barrier to innovation is a highly intertwined supply chain system within and between industries. Often a crisis in one part of an industry or an adjacent industry may cause failure to innovate for a company when it is unaware of how the industry and its supply chains are transforming.
Finally rapid change in the business ecosystem due to rapid advances in digital technologies, in particular of the sort that enables players from entirely different markets to enter and successfully compete with incumbents for products and services can outperform any innovative products that were painstakingly developed for the incumbent’s markets. Sometimes the success of new entrants is mainly due to new business models and network effects that they bring into the new market rather than the product features itself.
More than ever businesses need to scan the environment to detect shifts in technology trends, in markets, and in the competitive landscape that they operate in. The causes at the basis of many of these shifts are:
- New levels of complexity
- Transformation of the basis of competition, mainly through disruptive digital technologies particularly Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, the Internet of Things and, Augmented and Virtual Reality.
- Challenges of regulation for emerging industries
- Skills surplus and shortage
- Automation
- Security and privacy
- Consumer trust
- Indirect competition (industries that have never been your competitor will become your competitor for higher value products and services)
In order to work with complexity there is a need to break things down into smaller units and simplify. However, the key for success is to maintain and cultivate awareness of the underlying dynamic complexity of the context at hand. This helps to avoid the often detrimental mistake of taking assumptions that were made in order to create “workable simplicity” as facts. Well-informed awareness of complex systems enables the utilisation of their emergent properties to generate truly novel business opportunities.
Get in touch to find out how we can help you.
References:
- Learning to Live with Complexity by Gökçe Sargut and Rita McGrath Harvard Business Review September 2011.
- Innovation Versus Complexity: What Is Too Much of a Good Thing? By Mark Gottfredson & Keith Aspinall; Harvard Business Review, November 2005.
Celebrating 3 years of Camrosh: Dealing with complexity so you don’t have to
At Camrosh we’re at the forefront of innovation and technology and it’s been our role for the last three years to give businesses, in any stage of development, the insights and confidence to thrive in the face of uncertainty.
What we do
In giving business leaders the insights they need to succeed, we enable them to make sense of complexity and take informed action. We deliver a clear understanding of current and emerging trends to facilitate confident decision making for managing business change and sustainable growth. Like a puzzle, we bring your business and industry’s constituent parts together to give an informed picture of the whole, allowing for optimal strategic planning and execution.
“How do new disruptive technologies affect what my company does?”
“How are the latest and emerging innovations changing my customers’ businesses and their expectations?”
We’re glad you asked. Here’s how we’ll help.
Our Discover – Anticipate – Execute approach
Discover: to see, get knowledge of, learn of, find, find out, or to gain sight or knowledge of (something previously unseen or unknown)
Understanding the external environment of your business is key to designing and executing successful strategy. At Camrosh we use different tools and practices to create a full picture of that external environment for you, including technology and marketing landscaping, expert viewpoints, voice of customer and, current and future market opportunities.
Beneath the complexity and chaos of hype and information overload, there is a current that can be detected and exploited ahead of the curve. That’s where our discovery phase comes in. In discovery we give you the insight you need to explore technologies, markets and opportunities to innovate in complex and changing industries.
Anticipate: to realize beforehand, foretaste or foresee
Success is as much about choosing not to do something, as it is about doing something that was unimaginable before. We therefore work with businesses to anticipate technology trends and future scenarios, so you can shape your business’ future, and in doing so we help you stay ahead of the competition.
There are numerous ways we do this with you, including benchmarking the future, scenario planning, strategy gaming, startup watch and others. Whichever tools we use in the anticipate phase, the objective is to focus on the future to best prepare, shape and ultimately maximise the potential of your business strategy.
Execute: to carry out, accomplish, perform, do, or to produce in accordance with a plan or design
As a responsive dynamic system, the current business environment calls for well executed strategies. Our work on discovering your external environment and helping you become an anticipatory business will put you in good stead as we help you take the necessary steps for directing your investments, be they financial, technological or in human capital.
In working with businesses we give them a strong advantage over competitors when it comes to dealing with volatile and changing markets, supply chains and regulation, among others. Our approach to the execute phase is simple: plan, connect and acquire. We provide the strategic advice to enable you to implement decisions with confidence for long term impact to your business, and help you build a decision process that reduces assumptions and increases the robustness in your ongoing strategy execution.
Our Discover – Anticipate – Execute approach is highly adaptable and being technology and industry agnostic, we specifically select the most appropriate analysis tools for the requirement of the project.
Get in touch to find out how we can help you.