3D printing is an industrial-grade tool that rail transportation providers can and should be leveraging to secure their supplies of service parts, create tools that help maintenance and operations, and to enhance safety and customer experience.

The new year brings a fresh beginning, resolutions, and of course predictions. At Blueprint, we work with executives and engineers across the 3D printing industry and beyond. Based on our conversations and industry insight, here’s our perspective on what to expect in 2020.

It’s 2020, and additive manufacturing has finally emerged as a mature technology for production in a growing number of sectors. This post explores three ways that bad DFAM is holding up the profitability of many additive manufacturing programs.

Is consumer 3D printing dead? Oliver Smith, our lead innovation consultant, makes the argument it was never alive to begin with. The entry-level 3D printer market is seeing continued growth, but this success has been, and continues to be, driven not by casual consumers as was predicted, but professionals, businesses and institutions. In this piece, we chart the history of the hype to discover how the Wall Streets and Wireds of the world got it wrong, how the early start-ups rode the wave and got it just right, and how we learnt that desktop printers belong in factories, studios and labs, not living rooms.