The rise of 3D printing and the role of user firms in the U.S.: evidence from patent data

ABSTRACT

3D printing has been heralded as one of the key technologies for the Fourth Industrial Revolution but empirical analysis is still sparse. This paper provides empirical evidence by proposing a robust approach to identifying 3D printing inventions. Findings indicate the inventive activity has been rapidly growing since 2011 and is mainly led by user firms. The development of 3D printing has taken place in a variety of industrial sectors, not merely a specific sector. This implies 3D printing can be considered as a general purpose technology. Interestingly, the diffusion patterns of 3D printing vary across technological categories. User firms are divided into incumbent and new firms to examine how patent activities vary by the type of firm and time. Incumbent firms exploit 3D printing earlier than new firms do but new firms tend to enter into 3D printing space more than incumbent firms after the technology becomes prevalent.

KEYWORDS:

• 3D printing
• additive manufacturing
• a general-purpose technology
• patent analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Jongmin Choi is a Senior Researcher in Center for Government Competitiveness at Seoul National University. He holds a doctorate degree in public policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017. His diverse research interests include innovation, science and technology, industrial cluster, and regional economic development.

Notes

1 3D printing is formally known as additive manufacturing and the terms ‘additive manufacturing’ and ‘3D printing’ are often used interchangeably in the literature (Weller, Kleer, and Piller 2015).

2 Traditional manufacturing, such as shoes manufacturing, has been considered a labor-intensive industry, so firms have built factories in Southeast Asia to take advantage of low labor cost. However, the conventional strategy is changing. For instance, Adidas, a German multinational corporation for sportswear, sports equipment, and footwear, has built a new facility called Speedfactory in Ansbach, Germany to produce fully-customised shoes by using 3D printing.

3 3D printing can be either GPTs or disruptive technologies (Garrett 2014). The emphasis between GPTs and disruptive technologies is slightly different (Maine and Garnsey 2006). The literature on disruptive technologies focuses more on how new technologies allow new entrants to gain market share from incumbent firms and why incumbent firms hardly recognise the potential of new products and services with the technologies and consequently fail to innovate (Christensen 1997). On the other hand, the literature on GPTs pays attention to how GPTs have an impact on a wide range of industries (Lipsey, Bekar, and Carlaw 1998). The focus of this paper is on how 3D printing affects various industries, so the term of ‘GPTs’ is used for consistency.

4 It was used at the time of constructing data. The new company after the acquisition is now Clarivate Analytics.

5 Of 4509 patents, 98.13% of 3D printing patents were invented in one of the 366 U.S. metropolitan cities. As some scholars suggest (Lobo and Strumsky 2008), the inventive activity of 3D printing may also be an urban phenomenon.

6 3D Systems, Autodesk, BPM Technology, Desktop Factory, EvisionTech, Helisys (known as Cubic Technologies), MakerBot Industries, Materialise NV, Optomec, Sciaky, Solidscape, Stratasys, The ExOne Company, Type A Machines, and Z Corporation are dedicated 3D printer manufacturers. While most dedicated 3D printer manufacturers were established as new firms, some existing firms, such as Sciaky or Autodesk, have successfully diversified into this new area (Choi 2017).

7 Additional analysis was conducted to investigate any new insights on the growth curve of each group. Unfortunately, the growth curves showed no variation in all groups, except the group of user firms. This may be because of the fact that the other groups played a minor role in creating 3D printing patents.

8 Among user firms, Align Technology, ConforMIS, Sonitus Medical, Biomet, and OraMetrix are medical device firms that have actively engaged in the development of 3D printing, inventing 105, 69,35, 42, 29 patents, respectively. These firms, only representing 0.66% of the number of user firms, produced 280 patents which account for 9.2% of the number of 3D printing patents of user firms. This implies that the inventive activity of 3D printing is becoming vibrant in the fields of medical device.

9 Indeed, there are lots of incumbent firms and new firms that offer new products and services based on 3D printing. Firms presented here are the incumbent firms and new firms with active engagement in developing of 3D printing and creating inventions. They can be considered innovative firms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea [grant number NRF-2017S1A3A2065838].