The Trade War With China Could Accelerate 3D Printing in the U.S.

By Richard D’Aveni

The United States is in a cold war with China. As companies rethink their supply chains, they ought to seriously consider embracing a new manufacturing technology that’s now ready for prime time: 3D printing.

No longer relegated to trinkets and prototyping, 3D printing, which is also called additive manufacturing, is now moving into mass production. Printer makers have solved a variety of quality, cost and speed problems to the point where printers can compete with conventional manufacturers at volumes of tens or even hundreds of thousands of units.

The US military has already been working on additive as a quicker way to supply repair parts to remote locations and to make ultralight, high-performance fighter jets. The Trump administration is looking to ramp up those efforts with tax breaks and direct subsidies to companies that bring military supply chains home.

Speeding up the adoption of additive is still going to be a challenging investment, even with Pentagon subsidies. But companies making the upfront investment will likely reap even greater rewards down the line. From product design to customer outreach, additive enables a fully digitized enterprise that is hyper-responsive to market trends. Because 3D printers are so versatile, they can go from one kind of product to another with minimal time and cost for the switch-over. That means companies can move from industry-specific factories to plants that produce for multiple industries.

Once factories develop the software to coordinate and optimize these multi-industry operations, we’ll see the emergence of “pan-industrial” corporations. And once a pan-industrial perfects its integration software, it’s likely to create a software platform for suppliers and distributors to join. That’s the only way to fully optimize the value chain around additive. And as we know with Google and other software giants, the more companies you have on the platform, the stronger your platform will be.

The defense industry won’t be alone in pushing the additive frontier. It may just have the greatest urgency.

Richard D’Aveni is a professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business.