Category: The innovation blog

Fresh insights into the challenges that face your business

3D or not 3D?
To use an old political cliché, there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come. And judging from the Economist’s latest cover story (http://www.economist.com/node/18114327), that time is now and that idea is 3D printing, hailed by the authoritative business magazine as “a manufacturing technology that will change the world”. The magazine even hails inkjet for performing “a multitude of printing roles” and possibly changing “the economics of making customised components”.

At Loughborough University, Dr Neil Hopkinson and his team have invented a high-speed sintering system which, the Economist says, uses “inkjet print heads to deposit infra-red absorbing ink on layers of polymer powder, which are fused into solid shapes with infra-red heating”. One of Hopkinson’s projects is to supply plastic buckles for a winter-sports equipment company.

The Economist is hardly a lone voice in predicting such a shift. Pira predicts healthy double-digit growth in the inkjet market between 2011 and 2015 and points out that “researchers are examining inkjet as a method of seeding artificial tissue engineering… inkjet is also being used to label and decorate pharmaceutical tablets and decorate confectionery and bakery products”.

Many of the opportunities created by these technological shifts will fall outside the remit of traditional wide-format printing. But the industry can ill afford to ignore a technology which could replace mass manufacturing and reduce the time to take a digital design from concept to production by 50-80%.

The ramifications are stupendous, varied and revolutionary. And now is a good time to start considering its affect on your business.

The innovation blog

Fresh insights into the challenges that face your business

The Maine attraction
You’d like to put your business on a more sustainable footing, but who has the time and the money?

With pressure on prices, time and cash flow, it’s easy to be deterred by
rules and regulations and decide that becoming greener is just too
difficult. The experience of Portland Color, a wide-format printer in
Maine, New England, certainly suggests there is no quick or easy fix
(http://blogs.whattheythink.com/going-green/2010/08/learn-from-the-winners-portland-color)
but the company is saving serious money on waste disposal and shipping
costs and has much stronger bonds with the local community. Portland’s
environmental credibility helped it win a prestigious valuable deal with
retailer Bloomingdale’s.