Routes to the FutureVolume 2: How We’ll Make the World

Making the World of the FutureThe way we make the world around us – how we design, produce, deliver and reclaim the objects of everyday life – will follow new routes. We are trekking down many of these routes today but have just scratched the surface of where such journeys will take us.

That’s the premise behind this second installment in our Routes to the Future series, which explores trends disrupting the business landscape over the next decade – and beyond.

The manufacturing space is undergoing one of the most rapid transformations of all industries. In coming years, our ability to manufacture the world we want, tailoring it to our exact specifications, will change how and where we manufacture what we need, how we track what we make and how we close the cycle of material use and reclamation.

In this volume, we’ll examine the mobile movement in manufacturing, analyzing the shift from massive facilities and inventories to nimble, on-the-go production and hyper-customization. We know this metamorphosis has already reshaped retail. But how exactly will we shop in this new world? Who owns this future – a future where we’ll routinely 3D print objects the way we print photographs today? And finally, how will we protect rights to engineered materials and other intellectual property?

Like many companies, automation is making us more productive and changing our business model. But we’ve found that automation works best when coupled with human ingenuity. In coming years, manufacturers must also determine when and where to deploy automation while confronting tricky questions about what this growing reliance on machines portends for the future of work.

We’re bullish on 3D printing because we believe it’s the future of manufacturing. But that’s just the beginning. In fact, we’re heading toward a 4D-printed world where objects can be programmed to move, adapt to their environment and transform objects altogether.

It is a world beyond the Internet of Things. It is a world of limitless possibility. This is how we’ll get there.

InsideClick below to go to that section

3 Manufacturing gets nimble

9 Reshaping Retail, Reducing Waste

16 Security in a connected, intelligent world

Juan Perez Chief Information OfficerUPS

Routes to the Future: Volume 2Cover photo of laser metal deposition additive manufacturing appears courtesy of TRUMPF.

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Chapter 1: Manufacturing gets nimble

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Mobile plants, living products Over the next decade, the world will see a revolution. We’ll see a revolution not only in tools and platforms for additive manufacturing, but in the logistics of getting those tools and platforms to the people who need them – when they need them.

Whether you’re constructing a precision component for a prosthetic hand or building a house a day in a new Chinese settlement, the technology for doing it on site – at the point of need – is here today. It goes by lots of names: 3D printing, fabbing, digital manufacturing, additive manufacturing and as technology advances to the atomic level, molecular manufacturing. But whatever you call this technology, it can scale from the very small to the very large. And perhaps, most importantly, it’s mobile.

Manufacturing magic Picture a medical device truck that’s actually a mobile precision manufacturing factory. Amputees who are themselves immobilized won’t need to go to a clinic to be fitted for a new foot. The medical technician can come to the home, scan the patient, turn the scan into a 3D CAD design for a prosthetic foot, build it and fit it – all in one trip.

Or perhaps we’ll see a future where companies quickly assemble that jet engine or auto part – or even the car itself – without waiting for days for such items to arrive from the manufacturer.

Electronics manufacturer Siemens recently unveiled the model for 3D printing spider robots (see video at right). The machines, equipped with cameras and laser scanners, aren’t scary at all. These so-called SiSpis could build complex industrial products in just a fraction of the time required today. According to Siemens, the robots could one day assemble car bodies, hulls of ships and airplane fuselages.

Imagine if an engineer could upload a design and then watch as an “army” of spider robots worked together to build structures once considered impossible to construct.

Kiss inventory goodbye Unlike previous manufacturing revolutions, the technology driving this new industrial era isn’t confined to a physical factory occupying a set space.

Historically, the world of logistics was built largely on brawny facilities for manufacturing and sprawling warehouses, with big distributors competing for greater shares of the marketplace.

Siemens is looking at using multiple autonomous robots for collaborative additive manufacturing of structures, such as car bodies, the hulls of ships and airplane fuselages.

Image courtesy Siemens AG

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Retailers count on being the favored front door for access, whether that door is in a mall or on a website.

The centralized brick-and-mortar factory could one day be as rare as the brick-and-mortar bookstore is today. In the future, the factory will go where needed, when needed – and then go away.

Mobile manufacturing changes this underlying model of industrial production. Factories scale down and become transportable. Recall the progression from mainframe computers to desktop computers to laptops and eventually handheld devices. There may well be a similar trajectory for making the things we want and need.

And even if we don’t imagine that we’ll tap out instructions on our smart watches while standing next to the 3D-printing equivalent of an ATM, we should still expect that fixed industrial plant to splinter over the coming decade. It will disconnect from its foundations and disperse across scales to divide and conquer the future of making – one object at a time.

What’s driving mobile manufacturing? The technology behind 3D printing has reached an inflection point where it’s now being applied by amateurs and professionals alike for everything from precision parts to entire buildings – indeed, entire cities. Much of the innovation over the next decade will be in the platforms for 3D printing, both the printers themselves and software systems that support them.

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Project DanielHollywood film producer Mick Ebeling created the nonprofit, Not Impossible Labs, to find innovative crowd-sourced solutions to improve the lives of the most vulnerable. As part of this mission, Mick travels periodically to war-torn South Sudan to 3D print prosthetic arms for civilians who have lost limbs from the frequent bombings. Mick talks about Daniel, a Sudanese boy who can now feed himself with the help of a $100 prosthetic arm printed on location in a tent.

Image courtesy Not Impossible Labs / notimpossible.com

First 3D-printed carLocal Motors is 3D printing customized vehicles that can come fully equipped with autonomous driving and IoT technology. The Strati model is the world’s first car design to ever be 3D printed. The name “Strati” derives from the Italian word “stratiform,” meaning arranged in layers. The car has roughly 227 layers and is made from carbon fiber-reinforced ABS plastic.

Image courtesy Local Motors

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Seeing Logistics in 3DAlan Amling Vice President, Corporate Strategy, UPS

Of all the ways 3D printing will change the world, the democratization of manufacturing is perhaps the most important.

Think of it as the Uberization of manufacturing, where supply can be accessed anywhere in the world to produce goods at the click of button. This is a once-in-a-generation logistics opportunity, as so-called additive manufacturing will optimize the time and cost of making and delivering goods. Mass customization will be the new normal.

So what does this mean for the future of logistics?

We’ll see more direct-to-person manufacturing as well as delivery. Physical stores will be reserved for generic goods, not items customized to the individual.

Hybrid customization has enormous potential for logisticians. Imagine thousands of products from cell phones to blenders, each made with a common core but customizable covering. Third-party logistics providers are uniquely suited to

move these items. Logistics companies like UPS would simply store the common core in their warehouse, print the custom piece and finish final assembly near the point of consumption.

This would also disrupt service parts logistics. Right now, companies make and store hundreds of thousands of critical parts around the world at tremendous expense just on the off-chance that they’ll be needed for an emergency repair. In the future, these slow-moving parts will be stored virtually and printed on demand.

As a result, import and export costs – especially important to small businesses – will plummet dramatically.

As companies begin to take advantage of designing parts for 3D printing, the manufacturing industry will re-invent itself. Machines designed to construct a specific product will give way to 3D printers capable of making many different items. This will be the sparkplug for efficiency across supply chains. It will revolutionize how we get items to your doorstep. And it will forever alter how you search for and purchase goods every day.

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Forecast of 3D printer shipments worldwideIn 2016, the number of 3D printer shipments worldwide more than doubled the 219,168 units shipped in 2015. Gartner predicts that on average shipments will continue to double year over year, totaling more than 6.7 million shipments in 2020. This growth is largely due to the low cost of entry-level, material-extrusion printers and the expansion of printable materials. Prototyping will remain the primary enterprise use for 3D printers through 2020, while their use to augment manufacturing will grow to 75 percent of enterprises by 2020. By this time, nearly 65 percent of discrete manufacturers that expect to use 3D printers will use them to produce components of the products they sell or service.

Source: Gartner, October 2016

Even though 3D printing is a 30-year-old technology, we’re just scratching the surface of where additive manufacturing will take us. These printers are no longer reserved solely for prototyping and product design. We’ve moved beyond trinkets and souvenirs to items like hearing aids and aircraft parts, proving this is no fad.

The global 3D printing market will exceed $21 billion by 2020, according to Wohlers Associates. In addition, the demand for 3D printers, materials and services will surpass $10 billion by 2018, the consulting firm found.

Such promise is why UPS recently partnered with software company SAP to expedite the manufacturing and delivery of 3D-printed parts. Customers can go online and place an order through the Fast Radius website and these items will be printed either at a UPS Store location or printing facility connected to our air hub in Louisville, Kentucky – in as little as a day. This effectively creates end-to-end industrial manufacturing. And we expect these efforts to go global in the near future.

Moving beyond logistics, however, 3D printing will change the way we think. It will change how future generations learn and see the world. This technology can now keep pace with anything we imagine. We’re no longer forced to innovate in a world shackled to existing infrastructure.

If you can think it, you can do it.

Alan Amling oversees marketing efforts for UPS’s global logistics and distribution services. He moved into this role after serving as head of the New Product Development Concepts Team, overseeing the development of some of UPS’s largest product and marketing initiatives.

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Imagine a not-so-distance future in which we’ll animate the world of things. When we make a shipping box, we’ll expect that box to perform for us. If it’s taking a bumpy ride across punishing terrain, we’ll expect it to automatically expand its padding and flex its shell to absorb shocks. If it’s caught in a monsoon, it will turn hydrophobic, shedding moisture like water off a duck’s back.

And if the monsoon doesn’t let up, our storm pipes might flex to carry hurricane volumes of water away from our city streets. Or if it’s a simpler problem – say, the drainpipe under the kitchen sink springs a leak – we might not call a plumber. The pipe would simply heal itself.

This is no pipe dream. The technology for designing and making such adaptable objects is already taking shape in university laboratories and corporate research and development centers.

Traditional manufacturing relied on tools like stamps, mills and lathes to morph large, raw materials into smaller, finished products. Additive manufacturing relies on tools, too.

A 4D world The next phase of manufacturing is 4D printing, which allows us to use the base

technology of 3D printing to create materials, objects and eventually complex structures that can change over time.

At the core of this shape-shifting is a new ability to program materials to change in response to the world around them. Borrowing energy from ambient heat or motion, from wind or gravity or another passive source of energy, these programmable materials will change forms, following instructions designed into the material itself.

Using multiple materials in 4D printers at all scales, we’ll create complex adaptable objects in a single print. We’ll watch as the built environment builds and rebuilds itself.

Researchers at China’s Zhejiang University recently unveiled a plastic polymer that can fold and refold itself, much like origami. The material maintains previous features, even while morphing into a new form. Such a plastic polymer would have tremendous uses in medical, aerospace and defense settings.

Such a transformation won’t happen overnight. Entire industries – from construction to transportation to medical manufacturing and mining – will eventually need to embrace radically new approaches to everything from design to delivery. Even the way we occupy our built environments will change. This transformation is likely a century-long process. But over the next decade, the early experiments,

Strange, animated things

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from the trivial to the landscape-changing, will begin to bring the built world around us to life.

What’s driving Adaptable Objects?Nano-scale self-assembly. This vision of self-assembling systems, built up from molecules through spontaneous interactions with the environment, has been around since the 1980s. Progress has been slow but steady as innovators have targeted early applications in computing and biomaterials. It often takes 30 years or more for a technology to move from the lab into the commercial sector, and self-assembly now seems poised to break out of the world of the tiny and into the world of human-scale objects.

Extreme environments Massive population growth in urban areas and growing threats from super storms and other changes in our climate are creating new challenges. For example, a recent MIT study said storm management is one of the largest vulnerabilities for cities. Officials might turn to new kinds of pipes that flex with the flow of water

Flex with the flow

The MIT self-assembly lab is working to create pipes that can change size and shape and even undulate in response to environmental conditions like storms and floods. These storm pipes flex to carry large volumes of water away from our city streets.

Image courtesy Self-Assembly Lab, MIT + Stratasys + Autodesk

The nanotechnology market is expected to grow from 22.9 billion in 2013 to $64.2 billion in 2019.

Source: www.bccresearch.com

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or expand and contract depending on need. To accommodate runoff, roads and walkways might change their porosity, and tires might also adapt to these changing road surfaces.

Hyper-customizationMass customization has been the holy grail of manufacturing for the past few decades. People want products that meet their individual needs. Now customization may happen after production, when people begin to put products to use. Products that we interact with every day may even adapt to our individual bodies. Cosmetics, clothing and even furniture are candidates for such a transformation. In a decade, we could use makeup that adjusts its color by the time of day or lighting conditions and sunscreen that adapts to the cloud cover.

The next frontier: 4D printingThe next frontier of additive manufacturing is what’s known as 4D printing, which allows for materials, objects and eventually complex structures to be programmed to change shape over time in response to the environment around them. For example, wood can be programmed to adapt to extreme environmental conditions ( pictured above ). And carbon fiber can be used to create a non-mechanical morphing car airfoil ( pictured left ).

Image courtesySelf-Assembly Lab, MIT + Briggs Automotive Company + Carbitex LLC + Autodesk Inc.

Images courtesy Self-Assembly Lab, MIT + Christophe Guberan + Erik Demaine + Autodesk Inc.

Chapter 2: Reshaping retail, reducing waste

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New shopping for a new worldEven in a world where we can make just about anything, we won’t stop shopping. We’ll just shop differently. Instead of shopping for a dress or a bike, we’ll shop for ideas, designs, expertise and inspiration. And we won’t necessarily do it alone or online. We’ll do it in collaborative spaces that blend the virtual and physical.

And thanks to the advances made possible by 4D manufacturing, when we use up or no longer need a product, it will disassemble itself. It will break down into its molecular – and reusable – components, becoming a source of raw materials once again.

Retail will become a creative- and content-rich industry. Recycling will be performed automatically – and with scientific precision.

The future, in other words, looks green.

Retail marries consumers with inspirationPicture this: You’re a bride-to-be. You walk into the bridal gallery. You put on a virtual reality headset. It shows a virtual rack of dresses you can try on. You sample the dress in different wedding settings: traditional churches with flowers everywhere or outdoors in a grove of towering trees. You get a virtual fitting to make sure the dress will fit just right. The dress is then printed while you wait. But the process isn’t finished. The dress is made from a special material. You pay the licensing fee for a spool, as you’ll return the dress after the wedding to be deconstructed and reprinted for someone else.

Imagine going on vacation – and not packing a suitcase. That’s because a 3D printer will make any piece of clothing you could ever want, from the convenience of your hotel room. That’s the future as seen by Tel-Aviv based designer Danit Peleg – her latest collection was entirely 3D printed using home 3D printers.

And some retailers could opt to move away from massive physical stores lined with inventory. Instead, a line of 3D printers would suffice. Shoppers would effectively create their own display stands.

Tel-Aviv based designer Danit Peleg uses strong, flexible materials to 3D print high-fashion dresses and shoes. She believes that as this technology evolves, we will soon print our clothes at home.

Danit Peleg/Image Courtesy Daria Ratiner

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Or maybe you want to customize a dirt bike for a trip to the Western United States. You subscribe to a service that helps you turn your garage into the perfect man cave. It keeps you stocked with needed materials while you learn new assembly techniques.

Maybe you want to invite your buddies to work alongside you on the bike project – but remotely. So you buy a package event, a service for the day. It includes not just the gear designs but also a shared virtual space for you and your buddies to work together. It may also include virtual trial runs of your trip, a few on-tap expert advisers, even a drop-in visit from the reigning dirt bike champion.

Retail has always been about constructing personal identities. Whether we’re shopping for food or buying home furnishings, retail channels help make us who we are.

As the way we make the world becomes more individual and customized, those retail channels will shift from providing the physical props of life to inspiring us and teaching us how to make the lives we want.

Retail already has its own tools for doing this. It’s called advertising. And advertising will become even more central to retail’s role in experimenting. Instead of gazing at wedding dresses online or reading instructions for dirt bikes, we’ll use augmented reality to try out different visions of our lives, perhaps repeatedly, before we make a purchase.

And retail will be there to guide us, advertising designs, services, venues and knowledge – everything that we value. Retail will be the content channel that lets us discover who we want to be.

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Decline of retail sales The growth of retail sales has been declining slowly over the past two decades, from a maximum growth rate of 11.18 percent in 1994 to 3.3 percent in 2015. Point-of-need production will challenge the retail industry to update its business models, putting more focus on the information content of its services.

Augmented realityLong-anticipated, augmented reality technologies are finally entering the commercial market with everything from Google Glass to Microsoft HoloLens. These tools hold great promise in linking the physical world with visions of what could be. They are well-positioned to support a new retail industry focused on enriching the experience of things we build with content.

Online advertisingAdvertising has always been the backbone of the retail industry. As the Internet displaced television, radio and print as prime advertising channels, online ads have

What’s driving retail’s resurgence and precision recycling?

taken forms from banner ads to search-based ads and more recently, mobile device ads. Overall ad spending across all channels has declined, suggesting that conventional models of online advertising may have peaked. The most likely new path for advertising is through embedded content. The big play for retail is developing branded material.

Experiential marketing 3D printing presents new opportunities for advertisers doing experiential marketing. For example, for the 2014 World Cup, Nike 3D printed the exclusive lightweight Rebento duffel for three select World Cup players. In addition, the players received a set of shin guards with 3D-printed plastic webs to replace the traditional foam found in guards. The 3D-printed adjustment actually created a shock absorber while cutting materials. This allowed Nike to be the first to play in the 3D-printed accessories market at a time when millions of people around the world were watching.

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Precision recycling fuels the circular economyThis new age of on-demand items promises, paradoxically, to reduce post-consumer waste.

When you buy a toner cartridge for your printer, you won’t simply get a mailing label to return the spent cartridge to the manufacturer. You’ll get a kit to break that cartridge down into its molecular – and reusable – components.

Just as we’re learning to construct the world from the molecule up, we’re also learning to deconstruct it into its constituent molecules. In this world, every object becomes a source of raw materials. Whether you want to recycle old tires or want to get rid of some old electronics equipment or that avocado slicer you built in your home 3D printer, you may be able to reclaim value from the materials locked in those objects.

The buzzword for this new way of mining is molecular sorting. And it’s starting to happen everywhere from massive factories to hobbyist garages.

No assembly – or disassembly – requiredA large-scale tire recycling facility in Canada is now using microwaves to harvest oil, carbon black and steel from an anticipated 300,000 tires per year by breaking their molecular bonds.

A research consortium in Germany is using bacteria as the first step in recycling complex metals components – such as those found in electronics – into their constituent metals, which include rare metals.

Consumers feeding filament plastic into their desktop 3D printers can now add filament extruders that convert used plastic objects, like soda bottles, into recycled filament to their desktop hardware.

Taking this one step further: As production begins to incorporate 4D printing and as objects are designed for self-assembly, we may also find ourselves designing them for disassembly. Built-in triggers could deconstruct the object. An art installation might

Recycling with bacteriaBioleaching is the process of extracting metals using bacteria rather than chemical solutions. This is an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional extraction methods like smelting, which discharges large amounts of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and other toxic materials.

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revert to its molecular parts in the evening, reconstructing itself for the next morning as part of its performance. More practically, a shipping package might begin to revert to its constituent molecules once its seal has been broken.

The future of recycling is not just a technology story, however. It’s a story about the redesign of our entire production system into what some have called the circular economy.

When we decentralize production, we can also decentralize recycling. Instead of shipping our waste to giant offshore facilities for reclamation, we may well keep our materials local, circulating them in households, neighborhoods and local ecosystems – and creating distinctive local economies with distinctive materials and designs for those materials.

Growth of wasteWaste is both a profit and loss center for companies, communities and countries. The single largest U.S. export today is waste, and worldwide we’re producing more than 3 million tons of solid waste each day. Economic and environmental pressures will drive us to develop more efficient technologies for recycling.

Raw materials shortagesToday’s economy uses tens of billions of tons of raw materials each year. And according to a 2013 European Union study, we’re at increasing risk of suffering supply shortages in 14 critical raw materials, including antimony, beryllium, cobalt, fluorspar, gallium, germanium, graphite, indium, magnesium, niobium, platinum group metals, rare earth metals, tantalum and tungsten. These materials are all critical to today’s industrial production, and shortages will spur innovation for recovery.

Machine-generated efficienciesMachine learning allows manufacturers to gain predictive insights into every phase of production. While it increases production capacity, it also lowers material consumption because it has the potential to improve yield rates. Machine learning is also suited to optimize supply chains by allowing buyers and suppliers to collaborate more effectively.

Filabot is a plastic recycling company that builds machines for filament extrusion. The Filabot can turn everyday plastics into useable filament for 3D printing. Anyone can recycle waste into useable material right on their desktop. This includes failed prints, milk jugs and just about any household plastics. The Filabot reduces the waste and cost of any 3D-printing project and truly closes the loop for plastic recycling.

Image courtesy Filabot

Chapter 3: Security in a connected, intelligent world

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Who owns the future? In a future where we’ll routinely 3D print objects the way we print photographs today, protecting and managing the rights to engineered materials and other intellectual property will be a challenge.

Two features of this new world render it especially vulnerable to counterfeiters and hackers: digital design and internet-connected objects.

However, a hackable world isn’t entirely bad.

It means we can collaborate together to invent new solutions. Maybe we all have the same complaint about how our dishwashers are programmed. Together, we might devise a novel way to reprogram them and print out new circuit boards. Maybe a bike rack in your neighborhood is overrun with bikes. You might virtually design a clever, space-saving extension, print it when your local mobile 3D print truck comes around and get your neighbors to help you install it. Everyone wins.

But hacking can also wreak havoc on everything from intellectual property rights to road safety and even national security. And counterfeiters always stand ready to make a buck with illegally manufactured knockoffs.

New Products, new vulnerabilitiesInternet-connected objects can be hacked for profit, to spur political violence or purely mischievous reasons. As we build intelligence into all our products – from the simplest toy to complex machines like automobiles – we are vulnerable to malicious intent and even broader disaster.

For example, it’s possible to gain control of the onboard computers in today’s vehicles, potentially activating the brakes or shutting down the engine and crashing individual cars or causing major traffic jams during rush hour.

We already have tools for copying and reproducing objects – both legally and illegally. You can take a 360-degree photograph of an object with your cellphone, automatically convert the picture to a CAD drawing and then print millions of copies of the object.

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Genetic rights managementWatermarks are commonly used to claim ownership of digital content and block its unauthorized use. Genetic watermark codes and locks are now being built into living materials for the same reason. This helps identify the unauthorized use of genetically modified organisms protected by patents.

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This environment is ripe for illegal knockoffs of high-end products. But you might also take it a step further and deliberately build future problems into the object – for example, a variation in the circuitry of a chip that will open back doors when installed.

Today’s criminal economy reaches deep into marketplaces around the world, counterfeiting products and disrupting flows of goods both locally and globally. The world we’re making with digital design – 3D objects connected to the internet and 4D objects materially programmed to change over time – creates opportunities for crime at scales we’ve never imagined. The threats will tempt us to introduce even more controls in the name of safety.

The question is: Can we reap the benefits of this dynamic new material world without sacrificing basic safety or liberty?

Watermarks and locks Still, cautious optimism seems warranted.

We already see the rudimentary tools of what we might call genetic rights management. The first instance of a synthetic bacterium, demonstrated at the Craig Venter Institute in 2010, contained a genetic watermark – an embedded code in the form of four base pairs of DNA. More recently, in 2015, a group of Harvard scientists announced a technique to engineer E. coli to require a synthetic amino acid to survive. By introducing this so-called safety lock, the scientists assured that in the absence of this amino acid, the bacterium could not grow.

The watermark codes for Mycoplasma laboratorium, the first synthetic bacterium developed at Craig Venter Institute, are created with amino acids, each of which stands for a letter. The four watermarks contain the following information:

watermark 1: an Html script that reads to a browser as text congratulating the decoder with an email link (mroqstiz@jcvi.org) to click to prove the decoding.

watermark 2: contains a list of authors and a quote from James Joyce: “To live to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life”.

watermark 3: contains more authors and a quote from Robert Oppenheimer (uncredited): “See things not as they are, but as they might be”.

watermark 4: contains yet more authors and a quote from Richard Feynman: “What I cannot build, I cannot understand”.

Watermarks and locks have long been a way to claim ownership of digital content and block its unauthorized use. Now as innovative materials become the feedstock for broad-based additive manufacturing, watermarks and locks will be built into both living materials like the synthetic bacteria from the Venter Institute and the feedstock for 4D-printed materials designed to shape-shift.

Printed “infrastructs” Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft have created “infrastructs” – printed structures integrated into materials that can be scanned with terrahertz imagers to harmlessly identify unique objects with negligible cost. Such objects could be used as watermarks in all kinds of 3D-printed items.

Image courtesy Carnegie Mellon University/Microsoft.

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These intellectual property protections will, in turn, inspire commercial strategies to gain value from this new domain of IP. Just as digital rights management has changed our understanding of what it means to own a book that we’ve downloaded from Amazon on our Kindle, for example, material rights management will change what it means to own an object that we print.

Materials may be licensed for the life of the object you create from them but not for reuse in a new object. You may own your printed object but not the material it’s made from.

Some companies are getting ahead of the licensing quandary in this 3D-printed world. Hasbro, the toymaker, partnered with Shapeways, a 3D-printing marketplace and service, to let artists and fans manipulate their trademarked toy designs. Those artists can then sell their 3D-printed redesigns – think My Little Pony – to the public. Similar collaborations would allow global brands to open up their IP so others could co-create their products.

Whether you want to print a battery for your smart watch or a living bacterium that produces a distinctive flavor in a cheese, the materials you use will contain specialized intelligence. And with specialized intelligence comes strategies for owning, protecting and licensing that intelligence.

Meshmixer, a program designed by manufacturing software company Autodesk, allows users to combine multiple 3D files and distort them to create remixed models, coupled with self-assembling components.

Image courtesy of Autodesk / Meshmixer

How can we reap the benefits of this dynamic new material world without sacrificing basic safety or liberty?

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John Menna Vice President, Global Strategy for Healthcare Logistics

Even as people around the globe enjoy longer, healthier and more productive lives, the rising cost of healthcare threatens to impede such progress.

This is particularly troubling in the United States, as Baby Boomers approaching retirement place a greater strain on an overburdened healthcare system. Policymakers and medical leaders are scrambling for innovative ways to slow expenses – bracing for a demographic shift that will become arguably the central story in healthcare in the years ahead.

However, one of the great equalizers could come in the form of another disruptive technology: 3D printing.

Cost is at the center of the debate on 3D printing, with skeptics questioning whether 3D printers are too expensive to find a mainstream audience. But it’s equally important to examine how additive manufacturing could bend the cost curve in a number of industries, especially healthcare.

It’s expensive to bring new drugs to market, and developing cutting- edge technologies for evolving threats requires significant investment.

Image courtesy Lindsay France / Cornell University

How 3D Printing Could Bend the Cost Curve in Healthcare

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Additive manufacturing would bring newfound efficiency to the healthcare supply chain, both at the front and back ends. Right now, the pharmaceutical industry spends more than $50 billion annually on research and development. But with 3D printing, clinical trials for drugs could be more efficient, preserving valuable research and development budgets for private companies and nonprofits alike.

With developers creating treatment plans on demand, inventory levels would also shrink. U.S. hospitals, for example, generate more than 2 million tons of medical waste each year. Much of that “garbage” is unused medical supplies and equipment. Newer models often replace usable medical products that are destined for the landfill without ever leaving the bubble wrap.

But 3D printers could root out such inefficiencies. Already, surgeons are using 3D printing to develop replicas of the human heart for surgery. Prosthetics for children that once cost tens of thousands of dollars now run a few hundred dollars. And 3D-printed tools are reducing error rates in surgeries.

This is just the beginning. With so-called bioprinting, cells could be deposited layer over layer to grow organs. Imagine a 3D-printed liver or even 3D-printed lungs.

The 3D printer would essentially place any patient at the top of any donor-recipient list. Fewer people would risk death waiting for that perfect kidney match.

Much testing remains before widespread bioprinting becomes a reality. We must also clear a number of regulatory hurdles – safety and ethical standards should drive this process. This healthcare evolution won’t happen overnight, but 3D printing is providing a glimpse into a brighter future.

With 3D printing, scientists have created a bionic ear that can detect radio frequencies beyond the normal range of human hearing. Three-dimensional printers have created airway splints designed to grow as a baby grows. And researchers have developed 3D-printed skin for burn victims.

This is the ultimate form of personalized medicine, with doctors and surgeons tailoring medical plans to the individual rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

Elderly patients in need of a hip or knee replacement could benefit from the 3D printer for specialty implants. Because the process is more exact, these

patients would avoid the second or third procedure to replace traditional, less-effective implants.

In such a future, patients would live healthier and happier while driving down the cost of specialized and costly medical procedures.

But this is more about people than dollars and cents. Picture a patient living in a remote village in the heart of Africa without access to sophisticated surgeries and medicines. What was once too expensive – nothing more than a pipe dream – is now deliverable.

And a logistics provider like UPS can send 3D-printed medical supplies around the globe, connecting all corners of the world faster than ever before.

In this 3D-printed future, we’ll treat more patients. And by today’s standards, we’ll do so for pennies on the dollar. And those troubling healthcare spending charts? They’ll start trending in a downward direction.

John Menna is the Vice President of Global Strategy for Healthcare Logistics at UPS.

Routes to the Future / Chapter 3 p.22↜

3D bioprinting promises to print everything from drugs to entireorgans. 3D bioprinting promises to print everything from drugs to entireorgans.

p.22

What’s driving the urgency around material-rights management? Bioengineered materials Although chemical compounds are routinely patented, the growth of bioengineering will quickly propel material-rights management into the zone of living organisms. This is a zone fraught with legal, ethical and practical considerations that will likely contribute to market volatility over the coming decades.

Bioprinting In the world of medicine, 3D bioprinting promises to print everything from drugs to artificial human tissue and even entire organs. Organov is a lead player that uses a cellular bio-ink to create a scaffold for printing any 3D cellular structure. The market for designing and printing such structures is estimated to reach billions of dollars in coming years.

Biosecurity In a future where we routinely design and print living organisms for everything from medicine to waste management to energy production, the potential for disruption of our human ecosystem is great. Materials-rights management will not only seek to secure profits for innovators but also to track and manage potential bio-threats in the environment.

Supersonic hearingScientists at Princeton University have created a functional 3D-printed bionic ear that can hear better than human ears. The ear can hear radio frequencies beyond normal human range using embedded electronics.

3D bioprinting promises to print everything from drugs to entire organs.

Routes to the Future / Chapter 3 p.23↜ p.23

3D scanning With the growing sophistication of 3D scanning tools, we’ll find it easier to copy just about anything, from a designer watch to an automobile. While most knockoffs are small and unconvincing plastic replicas, we can expect counterfeiting of the physical world to grow as both scanning and printing technologies mature.

The Internet of ThingsAs we connect more and more devices to the Internet – from door locks to electrical outlets to automobiles and traffic signals, the potential for hacking our physical world is growing exponentially. Additionally, IOT sensors in manufacturing equipment will increase the value of machine learning’s data analysis and guidance. The Internet of Things will become a physical reality over the coming decade, creating risks as well as benefits of control and convenience.

p.23

Source: Cisco

By 2020, we can expect 50 billion objects to be connected to the internet – or just under 3 percent of all objects in the world.

Today, 3D printing hobbyists and artists are already using Autodesk’s free ReMake software to scan and recreate famous works of art. A more powerful version is available for monthly or annual subscriptions, but ReMake is always free to students and educators.

Image courtesy Autodesk

2012

8.7

2013

11.2

2014

14.4

2015

18.2

2016

22.9

2017

28.4

2018

34.8

2019

42.1

2020

50.160

50

40

30

20

10

0

6%

5%

3%

2%

0%

Penetration (RHS)Connected Objects

Conn

ecte

d O

bjec

ts, W

orld

(bn)

Pene

trat

ion

Rate

(%)

Routes to the Future Series:Volume 1: How We’ll Get Around in the Future

Volume 2: How We’ll Make the World

Volume 3: How We’ll Trade

Volume 4: How We’ll Work

Volume 5: How We’ll Interact

To be notified when the next installment of Routes to the Future is published, go to longitudes.ups.com and subscribe to “Routes to the Future.”

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