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3D Printing, Kickstarter and the TSB

Today, the UK’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB) announced a funding competition to develop new 3D printing technology. It’s called “Inspiring new design freedoms in additive manufacturing / 3d printing” and is offering funding from £100k to £1.5milion for collaborative, business-led design projects to overcome some of the “dirty secrets” of 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, with a total funding pot of £7 million.

Over the last year I’ve been watching the rise of 3D printing projects on Kickstarter, as they’ve progressed from fairly simple ones to the more recent, high profiles successes, such as the Formlabs Form 1 3D printer, which is a project to commercialise a printer, software and compounds. That one project alone has attracted just under $3 million in funding from over 2,000 backers, over 1,000 of whom will end up with 3D printers by next May.

Which made me wonder what the TSB is going to use my tax-payer’s money for in this competition, as it looks as if there is already a perfectly workable funding model to develop 3D printers. Or do they think that 3D stands for Dead Duck Donations?

Will you still text me, will you connect me, when I’m sixty four?

Now that the networks are growing out of their teens, is it time for them to think about a market they’ve largely ignored? Given the current pain that they are suffering from the youth segment’s bandwidth-obese usage of their “eat all you can consume” data plans, you’d think that they might want attract a target audience that offers the prospect of a more reliable revenue stream.

There’s an important conference coming up in London on 26th October that promises to address the issues that have limited success so far – Mobile Phones for the Senior Market. It’s important because there are some fundamental lessons to be learned and things that need to be changed if the networks are to approach the older generation with the same degree of attention that they currently lavishing on their twenty-something users. The resulting challenges need to be addressed, not just by the networks, but also by product designers and retailers.

The mobile phone business is now the largest volume segment of the consumer goods industry. Despite that achievement, it is an industry that is still remarkably young. It’s debatable whether it is actually mature enough to have addressed real segmentation yet – instead it’s still at the stage of development where it tends to concentrate most on customers of its own age – late teens. That could be a costly mistake. By ignoring the specific needs of older users, the mobile industry is missing a major market.

Designing Consumer Medical Products

To coincide with the Medica exhibition I wrote a White Paper called “Trust me – I’m not a Doctor” to explore some of the changes that I think are necessary for the development of usable consumer health devices. One reader came back to me with a very pertinent question – “It’s one thing to say what needs to change, but what steps can manufacturers take in order to keep up with the latest developments in technology?”

It’s a very good question. Much of the medical industry concentrates on gradual evolution. It’s not an industry that is either particularly fast moving, or prone to disruptive influences. Certainly Medica was very much about more of the same and not doing anything new.

That poses a real problem, and to address it I think you have to take a deliberatively disruptive approach by thinking outside the box. Rather than asking how to keep abreast of technology, which is only likely to increase the pace of the current linear evolution, I’d suggest the more heretical view of thinking about what happens to the market when the clinician is excluded from it.