Breakthrough: Samples and Competing On Design

The big challenge in small business start up, wherein one must compete on design, is samples of the new design.  The only hard part in business is getting the product right, defined as enough orders from customers to cover the supplier's minimum production run, in a workable amount of time, profitably.

This entails prospecting and idea with customers, of finding the best the best place in the world, getting samples, testing the samples and redesigning until you get the product initially right (after which market feedback will ever improve your product with each iteration.  Customer base grows with perennial improvement.

Now I have seen 3D printers for years, but this one is a breakthrough.  It is hard and functional, not soft and and mock-up.  It is likely this is probably too expensive in most of our applications now, but that will change over time. Right now it only copies what is existing, and in poly-resign. In time you will be able to feed in design specs and get it in metal or any other material.  At first it will be applied to commodity items, like the wrench in the example, but in time it will be applied to new ideas.

But two things will never change: innovations sell in leisurely confines, say the specialty store, and a close interaction with the market is required to move a business forward.  This 3D innovation will lower the cost and widen the access to innovation, but it will not destroy specialty retail any more than the innovation of bottling which allowed beer to be widely distributed and stored at home destroyed the tavern.

It would be a mistake to see this as the end of retail. Better yet think in analogy: How could this be transferred to chemicals, electricity, fabric, etc.?

What ticks me off is the way out of our economic mess is just such people as those featured in this story.  Instead we waste money on pointless wars, for the fun of it, bailouts of failures, so we are starving this kind of creativity.

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