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.

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.

With the announcement that Adidas will be shutting down its much-hyped USA and Germany Speedfactories, highly automated production plants driven by robotics and 3D printing, and relocating them to Asia, the media has been quick to assign the whole endeavor as a failure.

Formnext 2019: Lot of new players but where is the business value?