futurethink

Three dimensional printers are moving from the lab to the marketplace using technology that could redefine the very concepts of craftsmanship, engineering, and accessibility. As with any emerging technology, 3D printing comes with its share of controversy: the potential to infringe on patented designs or “print” weapon components has raised serious legal and ethical questions. Should certain applications of 3D printing be restricted?

Here are a few ways that companies have “pushed the envelope” on 3D printing capabilities: 

3D Gets Medical
An early-stage experiment at the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine is addressing the shortage of organ donors with a 3D printer that uses living cells to output a transplantable kidney. Using scanners and a small tissue sample, a 3D image of a patient’s kidney is created and a computerized process “prints” layers of living tissue that can be fused together. While patients will benefit from more immediate access, how will doctors and insurance companies accommodate this new realm of medicine?

3D Gets Edible
The French Culinary Institute and Cornell University are experimenting with a 3D food printer that brings an unparalleled level of precision into the kitchen. Upload a blueprint for a cake design, fill the cartridges with icing, and hit print. The result is an intricate and delicious piece of technology that could be available to consumers in the near future. Will self-printed cakes become the fad, making pastry chefs a thing of the past?

3D Gets Mass-Market

Is your organization leveraging forward-looking economic trends? Services now account for 80% of the U.S. GDP, with other developed nations showing similarly high percentages.

Product-dominant companies are adding service to their offerings because it is relatively inexpensive to implement, provides recurring revenue, and creates an effective differentiator in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

Consider how these companies successfully profited from this trend:

 1.     Capitalize on Services as Recurring Revenue Streams:

When Jack Welch took over at GE in the early ‘80s, he realized that relying solely on product sales was a short-sighted approach. He shifted the mindset of the company from a one-and-done sales strategy toward creating ongoing revenue streams with clients. GE now sells airplane engines nearly at cost but bundles them with highly profitable, multi-year service contracts. Can your bottom line benefit from service-and-product bundling?

Video is on the rise.

As Cisco predicted in its Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast, online video traffic in 2010 surpassed peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing in terms of total network usage. Currently at 26% of traffic, it’s expected to double by 2015, making up more than half of all Internet traffic. Of course, technology plays a role in this growth, as it becomes easier to share, stream, and play large video files, but there’s more to it than that.

Workplace norms around the use of video have quickly shifted. In contrast to just a few years ago, it’s now quite common to find organizations utilizing on-demand streaming video as a medium for training, HR, marketing, and executive communication purposes.

Alcatel-Lucent and Bell Labs are blazing a path towards what they call "Immersive Communications.” Their new development uses “mixed reality,” integrating video feeds of real people into customizable artificial environments. Multiparty calls become more natural, as participants are “placed” in a common virtual space, instead of each person appearing in a separate window on participants’ screens.

In today’s world, nearly any action we take creates a record of information, from visiting a website to making a credit-card purchase at a retail store.

The resulting trove of data is huge, and it’s growing at a staggering rate. Forecasting agency Gartner predicts that enterprise data, consisting of customer behavior, sales, supply chain, application use, location-based data, etc., will increase by 650 percent by 2015—a doubling of the world’s data every 18 months. We’re entering what’s collectively known as the Era of Big Data.

What does it mean for business? Big Data elucidates patterns that were previously invisible, reduces lag time between a company’s actions and learning the outside world’s reactions, and creates unprecedented opportunities for testing and optimizing any number of objectives.