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In-Depth Information
Like ants with factories
One future business model enabled by 3D printing and new design technolo-
gies will be cloud manufacturing. Cloud manufacturing, an alternative to mass
production, will consist of a network of small-scale, decentralized nodes of
production.
We're in the dawn of an era of big, interconnected, yet decentralized inter-
networked systems. We have Big Data. We have Big Business. Massive inancial
networks span the globe. We have elaborate economic ecosystems where a
monsoon in Thailand impacts the bottom line of a small business in Brooklyn.
Yet mass manufacturing remains a centralized process, concentrated in hubs of
specialized activity because it is enabled by economies of scale. Production takes
place in factories. Product design is concentrated mostly in professional irms.
Compare the way the telecommunications industry has changed over
the years. Once upon a time, phone networks were large, centralized, and
unwieldy. A single pay phone would serve several city blocks of people. Each
family home had a single landline.
Today, an estimated 60 percent of the world's population owns a cell phone.
Each phone is physically tiny, when it stands alone. However, when billions
of cell phones all over the world are woven together into a distributed global
network, the combined effect is a disruptive, powerful, and gigantic system.
Mass manufacturing still resembles a phone booth rather than a network
of cell phones. But this is going to change. Like billions of cell phones, manu-
facturing might someday consist of millions of small autonomous nodes of
production.
3D printing is the catalyst that cloud manufacturing has been waiting for.
Cloud manufacturing will be a decentralized system, built on a foundation of
ultra-large networks of small manufacturing companies. Wikipedia deines
cloud manufacturing as systems “where various manufacturing resources and
abilities can be intelligently sensed and connected into wider internet, and
automatically managed and controlled.”
In his landmark topic,
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling
Less of More
, author Chris Anderson described the collective power of bloggers
as that of “ants with megaphones.”
1
Until the Internet gave them a worldwide
platform, individual writers struggled to make their voices heard. Now, the
collective communicative capacity of bloggers exceeds that of journalists work-
ing for large media companies. 3D printing technologies will make Makers,
consumers, and small companies into ants with factories.
