A Market of a Few

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From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

3D Printing Applications

361 ratings

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

3D Printing Applications

361 ratings

This course will help you understand how 3D printing is being applied across a number of domains, including design, manufacturing, and retailing. It will also demonstrate the special capabilities of 3D printing such as customization, self-assembly, and the ability to print complex objects. In addition to business applications, this course will also examine how individuals, including those in developing countries, are using this technology to create solutions to the problems they face. This course will also provide an overview of design thinking and how you can use this framework to develop ideas that can be turned into objects. Learners who complete this course will obtain a rich understanding of the capabilities of 3D printing and how to think about designing objects for this new technology.

From the lesson

Module 2: 3D Printing – On-Demand Manufacturing

In this module, we will discuss examples of how 3D printing enhances product customization as well as the development of on-demand manufacturing. We will look at how individuals, entrepreneurs, and businesses can leverage the ecosystem to turn ideas into objects. Finally, we will consider the importance of intellectual property issues in 3D printing.

A Market of One – 3D Hubs6:04

A Market of a Few4:08

On Demand and Local – TechShop10:51

Learning by Making and Making for Fun at the Fab Lab8:58

For Businesses and Entrepreneurs8:31

Careers in 3D Printing5:47

Meet the Instructors

Vishal Sachdev
Clinical Assistant Professor , Director, Illinois MakerLab
Business Administration

[MUSIC]

So in this video we will speak to Lauren Slovic who's the design evangelist at

Shapeways.

And Shapeways, as you have seen earlier in the course with Professor is a platform

that allows you to upload designs, and have them shipped to you, or others.

You can set up your own shop on Shapeways as well, or

just print one design that you want to get printed.

In this video, she will share some examples of how Shapeways

enables individuals and entrepreneurs to produce on demand.

So she'll talk about some case studies with Kickstarter,

which is a crowdfunding platform.

And how somebody would create a campaign on Kickstarter and use Shapeways

as sort of the back end fulfillment platform without needing to actually have

control or coordination issues with the actual production process.

You create an idea, you get support for it, community support or

broad-based support on platforms such as Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, and then you

find somebody who fulfills the making of that product, leveraging 3D printing.

And that's where Shapeways provides an interesting example of how your ideas can

turn to objects without expensive investments in, perhaps,

some manufacturing facilities.

So join us in our chat with Lauren.

>> [SOUND] There's a couple examples I can think of.

Probably the first success story we had was a designer named Joshua Harker who

designed these beautiful filigree skulls, and

I believe he did them as a fundraiser project.

And it became a wild success, and

he ended up getting thousands of orders for these objects that

he probably wouldn't have been able to fulfill all the orders on his own.

But we fulfilled all I think something like 4,000 of

them all on time, and he was able to do a huge amount of fundraising.

And that was outside of Kickstarter, I think it was his own fundraising platform.

We've definitely done successful partnerships with Kickstarter projects.

Coolest Cooler is another one, one of their rewards for

donors was a miniature keychain version of the product that they were actually

developing, and that was a huge success as well.

Another group is Hero Forge.

So they started off as a Kickstarter,.

They use our service API to create custom

table top gaming avatars, so you can be an elf, or a dwarf, or a witch,

or whatever, and you can print on some of different materials.

So they're are actually able to run their entire business

as proposed on Kickstarter through our supply chain and our manufacturing.

Yeah.

That's a great question.

We are a global company.

We started in Europe,

our headquarters moved to New York, but we ship everywhere around the world.

Our distribution centers are capable of shipping anywhere.

And we have a marketplace that can ship anywhere around the world.

So whether you use our marketplace on shapeways.com, or you use our API,

we essentially support global entrepreneurship from the start, so

it's really no question.

You can start an account, start a shop today, and have a global audience for

your product almost immediately.

[MUSIC]

[SOUND]

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