In today’s manufacturing, with the increased widespread adoption of 3D printing technology and its new accessibility and affordability, tomorrow’s prototyping will continue to be dramatically different. Every day more forward innovations become available enabling legacy enterprises and agile startups with the ability to create, test, perfect and market their products. As a result, we are discovering new ways to operate, compete and scale exponentially.
Established companies, 30 years or older, have now accepted 3D printing as central to their business models. This means legacy enterprises have sophisticated understandings of the economic minutia of use-cases, cost-benefit analyses, and break-even points of 3D technology. They are the “power users” who continue to dominate the industrial manufacturing market. Further, money savings and ease in accessibility will open up opportunities for individuals and small businesses. Before the widespread availability of 3D printing, it could be prohibitively expensive (if not impossible) for entrepreneurs to prototype a product on their own. This meant great ideas never had the chance to be made and marketed.
Live prototyping leverages many of the advantages of both low fidelity and high-fidelity prototyping approaches. Like rapid prototyping, live prototyping is “rough” enough to keep costs down and operations agile, but like piloting, it is polished enough to allow for contextualized market-testing. (“Contextualized” here refers to the way that live prototyping enables a business to better determine how consumers will actually behave toward a product in “real life” rather than relying on potentially misleading consumer surveys and focus groups to glean this information.)
These processes and trends are changing the ways businesses operate and compete in economies of scale. Because widespread adoption of 3D printing is still in its early stages, this disruptive technology still holds immense untapped potential we can expect to see in the next decade. What the future of 3D printing holds is the cause for much speculation, but if the last ten years are any indication, we can expect to see innovation that will defy our current imaginations.
We present to you, “Top 10 Prototype Engineering Services Companies - 2022.”
