Cloud Based 3D Printing Business Modeling in the Digital Economy

Introduction

3D Printing became a sudden Gold rush in the past two decades. This was inspired by rapid innovations in digitization and increased competitiveness among businesses. The pace of innovation across economic sectors also increased rapidly, and this brought a new challenge to enterprises, the need to hit the markets fast. The general consumer population is increasingly becoming more educated as more information becomes readily available through the cloud. Virtual communities and social networks have also led to the advent of new entrepreneurship approaches. Social entrepreneurship has become common in today’s modern world. 3D printing (i.e., additive manufacturing) is an old technology that was progressing slowly but became a significant pillar of supporting innovation and quick time-to-market in many enterprises. Products can now be launched faster because the technology eliminates complex stages of product research and development. Where new tooling for new parts design would take several weeks or months to produce, 3D Printing has eliminated those stages. Big companies have gone further to using 3D printing to make ready-to-use parts, which can be used as spare parts replacements. This significantly reduces down time in many industries. However, by nature, 3D printing remains unsuitable for mass production. This calls for innovative business models to sustain the technology, whilst tapping from its unquestionable benefits. There are many proven business applications of 3D printing, which include new-product design/prototyping, spare parts replacement, 3D printed ornaments, children toys, education and many others such as the medical fields. However, business viability factors in many considerations which if not taken into account can result in unsustainable issues and subsequent failure of the initiatives. Adopting appropriate business models bring in viability and promote growth of the 3D printing technologies through proper appreciation and continued innovation.

3D printing is rapidly developing into an important but also disruptive technology with the potential for societal-wide change as witnessed with the introduction of the automobile, personal computer, the Internet and smartphones (Mills, 2015; Petrick & Simpson, 2013). The technology influences many processes in production, supply chain design, logistics, product life-cycle planning, and consumer behavior (Mellor et al., 2014; Berman, 2012; Bogers et al., 2016). Research has argued that this technology not only has profound effects on manufacturing businesses but also on society, which demands new corporate strategies and policies alike (Jiang et al., 2017). The article looks into details of various promising entrepreneurship applications of 3D printing, cloud computing technologies and their disruptions to the traditional business approaches. Innovative entrepreneurship models are then considered with the view of proposing new business models for adoption by the modern e-entrepreneurs in the digital economy. Practical scenarios are considered, and the case studies can be applied in any other 3D printing environment following the proposed template approach.