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M A N U FA C T U R I N G A N D I N N O VAT I O N
April 21st 2012
696
signers, IT specialists, accountants, logis-
tics experts, marketing sta, customer--
relations managers, cooks and cleaners, Tobacco
all of whom in various ways contribute to
the factory. And outside the gates many
more people are involved in dierent oc-
cupations that help to supply it. The de-
690
Pharmaceuticals
nition of a manufacturing job is becoming
591
Despite China’s rapid rise, America remains a formidable in manufacturing, says Michael Idelchik,
production power. Its manufacturing output in dollar terms is head of advanced technologies at GE Glo-
now about the same as China’s, but it achieves this with only bal Research, the R&D arm of one of the Footwear
10% of the workforce deployed by China, says Susan Hockeld, world’s biggest manufacturers. The ideas
president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that will make this happen can come from
anywhere, which is why his laboratory, 580
Beverages
based in bucolic Niskayuna in upstate
The new world order
Manufacturing, 2005 prices, % of world output
1 New York, also has research centres in
Bangalore, Munich, Rio de Janeiro and
Shanghai. As for the jobs likely to be
559
Furniture
US China Japan Germany Britain India created, Mr Idelchik thinks people have a
30 myopic view of manufacturing employ-
ment: If you look at everyone who con- 558
Non-manufacturing avg.
25 tributes, it is a very large occupation.
20
Ghost in the machine
A lot of the jobs that remain on the 558
Pottery
15 factory oor will require a high level of
10
skill, says Mr Smith, Rolls-Royce’s manu-
facturing boss. If manufacturing matters,
then we need to make sure the necessary
537
Toys and sporting goods
building blocks are there in the education
5
system. His concern extends to the rm’s 490
Retail bakeries
0 suppliers, because companies in many
*Adjusted for worker and
1970 75 80 85 90 95 2000 05 10 countries have cut down on training in job characteristics
Source: UNCTAD the economic downturn. To get the peo- 1 Source: Brookings Institution
2 ple it wants, Rolls-Royce has opened a new Apprentice Academy Boston’s biotechnology cluster consists of pharmaceutical
to double the number of people it can train each year, to 400. companies big and small, attracted in large part by the research
In America rms have cut back on training so savagely that being carried out in the region’s hospitals and universities. In the
apprenticeships may well be dead, reckons Suzanne Berger, biological sciences the development of manufacturing capabili-
one of the leaders of a new MIT research project, Production in ties is closely linked to that of the product, says Phillip Sharp, a
the Innovation Economy, which is looking at how companies Nobel prize-winner and co-founder of what is now called Bio-
compete. Many rms feel that it is not worth training people if gen Idec, a Massachusetts-based biotechnology rm with annu-
they are likely to leave to work for someone else. Ms Berger and al revenues of $5 billion. What currently excites the industry,
her colleagues think one promising alternative to apprentice- says Mr Sharp, is nanotechnology. This takes its name from the
ships is a collaboration between community colleges and local word for a billionth of a metre. When materials are measured at
rms to develop training programmes. Sometimes the rms do- the nanoscale they often have unique properties, some of which
nate manufacturing equipment to the colleges. can be used in benecial ways.
The digitisation of manufacturing will make training easi- Nanotechnology makes it possible to manufacture, on a
er. Companies cannot justify halting production equipment tiny scale, new therapeutic substances carrying information on
which may be running 24 hours a day so that trainees can play their surfaces that can be used to direct them to particular cells in
around with it. But computers can simulate production systems the body. The drugs delivered by such substances could be valu-
in a virtual environment, and products too. At Warwick Univer- able in treating diseases like cancer. They are being made in
sity in Britain, a room with giant high-resolution screens is used small quantities now, says Mr Sharp; the challenge will be to
as a virtual-reality chamber to simulate products under develop- scale up those processes once clinical trials are completed. And
ment, such as cars, in three dimensions. that, too, he adds, will depend on both product and manufactur-
A new vehicle today is likely to be ing innovation working together.
drawn up as a three-dimensional digital Making drugs for the most part remains an old-fashioned
prototype long before it is actually built. batch-manufacturing process. This involves assembling ingredi-
It can be walked around, sat in, test-driven ents, often from dierent countries, processing them in a chemi-
in a simulator, taken apart and placed in a cal plant into a batch of drug substance, then turning that sub-
virtual factory to work out how to build it. stance into pills, liquids or creams in another factory, which
And the same software can be used by might be in yet another country. All this involves a lot of moving
others in the company, including advertis- around of drums and containers, and plenty of inventory sitting
ing sta who want to market the vehicle. idle. It is time-consuming and expensive.
The images generated from digital proto- But in a laboratory in Boston another way of making drugs
types are now so good they are often used is being developed. Raw materials are put into one end of a
to produce brochures and television ads machine full of tubes, cogs, belts and electronics, and pills pop
before a new car is built, says Grant Ro-
chelle, a director of Autodesk, a Silicon
Valley software company. Raw materials are put into one end of a machine full of
Many people working in factories
are providing services that are crucial to
tubes, cogs, belts and electronics, and pills pop out of
manufacturing. In the future more pro- the other end
ducts will be sold on the basis of service,
says Kumar Bhattacharyya, chairman of
the Warwick Manufacturing Group at Warwick University. If out of the other end. This pilot production line, a joint venture
you sell a car with a ten-year warranty you need to make sure it between MIT and Novartis, a giant Swiss-based drugs company,
will last for ten years and that you have the services in place to is pioneering a continuous manufacturing process for the phar-
look after it. Despite high unemployment, some manufacturers maceuticals industry. It is producing a copy of a standard Novar-
say that too few people are choosing engineering and manufac- tis drug, although not for use yet because the system is still ve to
turing careers, but new technologies like 3D printing will help, ten years away from commercial operation. It relies on a combi-
predicts Lord Bhattacharyya. If you can build something, peo- nation of chemistry and engineering, speeding up some process-
ple get excited about making things. Then they go and set up es and slowing down others to make them work together.
companies. The results are encouraging, says Stephen Sofen, the pro-
ject’s director. The number of discrete operations involved in
Come closer producing the drug has been cut from 22 to 13; the processing time
One of the most successful incubators for new rms are in- (even excluding all the moving around of materials) has been
dustrial clusters, of which Silicon Valley is the best-known and shrunk from 300 hours to 40. And instead of testing each batch
most imitated example. Firms cluster together for a variety of of material, every pill being made is monitored to ensure it meets
reasons: the skills that are available in a particular area, the con- the required specication.
centration of specialist services and the venture capital from in- Continuous manufacturing could transform the pharma-
vestors with a close understanding of their market. Usually there ceuticals industry. Instead of a giant, purpose-built plant to sup-
are universities and research laboratories nearby, so the process ply the global market, you could imagine smaller, regionalised
of coming up with new ideas and the means of turning those plants, says Mr Sofen. Such factories could respond more rapid-
ideas into products are closely linked. This relationship is set to ly to local demand, especially if a pandemic were to break out.
become even more intimate with new manufacturing technol- The pilot line in Boston will t into a shipping container, so it
ogies. We have technologies now we are only able to exploit if could be deployed anywhere. It can make 10m tablets a year,
we have manufacturing capabilities in some proximity to those working around the clock. It might also be used to make custo-
innovations, says Ms Berger. You do not have to move far from mised doses of drugs for particular patients. Continuous manu-
her oce to nd examples. facturing could make more treatments commercially viable. 7
Comparative advantage 150 suppliers in all, many of which also make or nish their parts
in China). The researchers estimated the total worldwide labour
The boomerang eect costs for the iPad at $33, of which China’s share was just $8. Apple
is constantly tweaking its products so the gures shift all the
time, but not by much.
If China accounts for such a small share of the overall la-
bour costs, surely Apple could aord to make iPads in America? It
As Chinese wages rise, some production is moving
turns out that low wages are not the only attraction. What Shen-
back to the rich world zhen has to oer on top is 30 years’ experience of producing elec-
THIRTY YEARS AGO Shenzhen was little more than a vil- tronics. It has a network of rms with sophisticated supply
lage, abutting the border of Hong Kong’s New Territories. chains, multiple design and engineering skills, intimate know-
When China’s rst Special Economic Zone was established in ledge of their production processes and the willingness to leap
the early 1980s, workshops started to grow and glistening sky- into action if asked to scale up production.
scrapers began to rise up. Its population is now around 12m, in- What Shenzhen provides, in other words, is a successful in-
cluding perhaps 6m migrant workers. They often live in dormito- dustrial cluster. It works for Apple because many of the electron-
ries close to the factories that have helped make this city one of ic parts it uses are commodities. The real innovation lies in de-
the richest in China. signing the product and creating smart software, which is the
One of those factories is known as Foxconn City. Owned by speciality of another successful cluster, in Silicon Valley, where
Hon Hai Precision Industry, a Taiwanese company, it is among Apple is based.
the largest manufacturing complexes in China, employing some
230,000 people. Some of Apple’s iPhones and iPads are assem- Where China scores
bled here. In March Apple agreed to improve working conditions Li & Fung, a Hong Kong rm that helps companies nd sup-
at its Chinese factories after an outside audit found abuses of la- pliers in Asia, says in a recent research report that clusters like
bour codes, including excessive overtime. Shenzhen are an integral part of China’s international compe-
Countries that make things more cheaply than others are tence in manufacturing. It counts more than 100 industrial clus-
often accused of running sweatshops, and labour in China was ters in Chinaincluding one, in Zhuji in Zhejiang province, that
undoubtedly cheap: that was why Hong Kong’s clothing and toy just makes socks. It consists of more than 3,000 small and medi-
factories moved to the mainland. But with increasing prosperity um-sized enterprises in the production chain for socks. As long
Chinese workers want more pay, shorter hours and more bene- as China’s clusters maintain their edge, these jobs, whether pro-
ts, just as Taiwanese, Japanese and South Korean workers did ducing iPads or socks, will not go back to America or Europe.
before them. Labour costs in China have recently been growing Yet some jobs are returning to developed countries. With
by around 20% a year. Chinese wage costs rising, America’s productivity improve-
Some labour-intensive businesses are now moving from ments can help tip the balance, especially when American rms
the coastal regions to inland China, where costs are lower, invest in more automation. Yet robots can be used anywhere to
though the infrastructure may not be up to the mark. A number reduce labour costs. For example, Terry Gou, Hon Hai’s boss, 1
of rms, especially those making clothes
and shoes, have upped sticks and moved
to Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia and 3
Slicing the Apple
Vietnam. Nike, for instance, used to make
Distribution of value for 16 GB Wi-Fi iPad*, 2010
most of its trainers in China, but many of
Profit/cost breakdown†, $ (Share of retail value†, %)
its big suppliers have moved elsewhere,
and in 2010 Vietnam became the com- PROFITS TOTAL RETAIL PRICE:
pany’s biggest production base world- $499
Apple:
wide. Unless some way of making shoes 150 (30.1)
and clothing without manual labour
emerges (which, as this report will suggest
later, is entirely possible), these businesses
will move again in the future; Myanmar Subcontractors‡:
South Korea 34 (6.8) COSTS
looks tempting, provided that reforms
there continue. unidentified 27 (5.4) Materials &
components:
Yet for some manufacturers low other United States 12 (2.4) Worldwide
wage costs are becoming less important Japan 7 (1.4) 154 (30.9)
because labour represents only a small Taiwan 7 (1.4)
part of the overall cost of making and sell-
European Union 1 (0.2)
ing their products. Researchers for the Per- Labour:
sonal Computing Industry Centre at the unidentified
University of California, Irvine, took 25 (5.0)
apart an iPad and worked out where all China
8 (1.6)
the various bits inside came from and
what it had cost to make and assemble Distribution
them (see chart 3). They found that a 16-gi- 0
& retail:
gabyte 2010 iPad priced at $499 contained Worldwide
75 (15.0)
$154-worth of materials and parts from
*1st generation, Wi-Fi only version
American, Japanese, South Korean and Source: Kenneth L. Kraemer, †Numbers do not add to their respective totals because of rounding
European suppliers (Apple has more than University of California, Irvine ‡Non-labour, components only. Assigned to corporate headquarters
2 says he is planning to use more robots for assembly work in Chi- been rising, containers are expensive and sta have to be main-
na. He is also setting up factories in some of the inland provinces. tained in both countries to manage the operation. It is also di-
Again, wage costs are not the only consideration in transfer- cult to react quickly if the market changes. Typically there would
ring production from China back to America. Chesapeake Bay be 30 days or so of inventory at each stage of the supply chain:
Candle used to ship its scented candles for the American market the stock held by the suppliers to the Chinese factory, that fac-
from China, and then from Vietnam when America raised im- tory’s inventory, the content of a shipping container on its way to
port taris on Chinese-made candles. In June 2011 the company America, and so on. A design change could take at least six
opened a highly automated factory near its base in Maryland, months to implement. Now the company can get a prototype to
partly because of rising labour costs in Asia and increased ship- a customer in a couple of weeks.
ping charges, but also because having a research and develop- Mr Campagna would be happier if the economy were
ment facility in the American factory allows the company to re- brighter, but says that making 95% of its products in America in-
spond to new trends much faster. stead of 65% has transformed the rm’s business. The company
The candle-maker is keeping its factory in China to serve used to have 250 workers in America and 400 in China; now it
the vast domestic market there. Many rms are adopting this has 350 in America and robots doing hot and dirty jobs, like
China plus one strategy, usually putting an additional produc- pouring molten aluminium and laser-cutting steel. The new ar-
tion base in a lower-cost country in Asia. The idea is now being rangement, Mr Campagna reckons, makes us very nimble.
extended to repatriating manufacturing facilities to rich coun- That not only speeds up the production of customised brackets,
tries. This also saves companies from having all their eggs in one it also helps with the standard stu. The company’s standard
basket. A string of natural disasters in recent years has shown products used to have a ten-year life cycle, but with new televi-
that lean supply chains can snap all too easily. sions appearing at an ever faster rate its stands and brackets now
For Peerless AV, a company based in Aurora, Illinois, mov- need replacing every 18 months or so.
ing production back from China began with worries about pro-
tecting its intellectual property. Peerless makes metal brackets Sunshine and silicon
and stands for all sorts of televisions, ranging from screens hung Can repatriation work for commoditised goods too? Until a
in oces to information displays at railway stations and the decade or so ago most of the world’s solar panels were made by
giant video walls used at music and sporting events. To make American, European and Japanese rms. Then Chinese manu-
lighter, better-looking supports for the thinner screens it saw facturers piled into the business, helped by various government-
coming, the company decided in 2002 to produce a range made backed incentives. China has now captured more than half the
from aluminium instead of steel. Unable to nd an American world market for the most widely used solar panels, which rely
rm to supply suitable extrusions and castings at the right price, on photovoltaic cells made from crystalline silicon. But that
it turned to China. As the at-screen boom took hold, sales could change again.
soaredbut then the company began to nd copies of its pro- Partly because of China’s onslaught, the bottom dropped
ducts turning up all over the world. out of the market: the price of silicon-based solar panels fell from
It was these knock-os that led to a decision to bring pro- $1.80 per watt at the start of 2011to 90 cents by the end of the year,
duction back to America, says Mike Campagna, the rm’s presi- according to GTM Research, a market-research rm. This clob-
dent. Other benets were to follow. By chance the car industry bered some rms that used dierent solar technologies. One of
had gone into a slump and the company was able to pick up the those casualties was Solyndra, a Californian rm, which manu-
manufacturing equipment it needed at low cost. It also managed factured photovoltaic panels in the form of thin-lm coatings in-
to track down people with production experience. For the rst side arrays of transparent tubes. Although more expensive than
time since its launch in 1941, the rm took on debt: $20m-worth to the silicon-based panels, the tubes were able to capture sunlight
build and equip a new factory, which opened in 2010 to house all more eectively at dierent angles throughout the day. But So-
its operations under one roof. lyndra could not compete against the glut of Chinese panels. It
The total cost of manufacturing in China is not as cheap as led for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year, despite having (contro-
it might appear to be, says Mr Campagna. Shipping costs have versially) received $535m in federal loan guarantees. 1
0.8 It will use thin-lm technology bine blades, is also somewhat unusual. Designers, engineers
0.6 to make larger and lighter pan- and production sta are housed under one roof rather than in
0.4 US advanced
manufacturing els which it reckons will cut in- dierent buildings or even dierent countries. They were
0.2 stallation costs by about half. brought together because Rolls-Royce believes that proximity
0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 1.2
Employing just 350 people, the will lead to a better understanding of each other’s roles and
Low estimate GE facility will be capable of greater inventiveness. That will be crucial in the years to come,
Sources: MIT; producing enough panels ev- says Hamid Mughal, Rolls-Royce’s head of manufacturing engi-
US Department of
energy; Spine Solar; *Includes costs of
ery year to power around neering: Product technology is the key to survival, and manu-
company reports shipping to the US 80,000 homes. 7 facturing excellence provides one of the biggest opportunities in 1
2 the future. That combination, Mr Mughal believes, is the only quarter of the weight, will last for 20 years without servicing and
way to keep coming up with breakthroughs: Incremental in- work well in freezing or extremely hot conditions, says Glen
creases won’t do it. Merfeld, in charge of energy-storage systems at GE’s laboratory.
Much the same thinking can be found at GE. It also makes One material that particularly interests GE and other
jet engines and has businesses that include energy, lighting, rail- manufacturers is carbon bre. This is already being used to make
ways and health care. It became clear to us a number of years the large fan blades at the front of some jet engines. It is exible as
ago that we needed to merge materials research and manufac- a raw material, but when a carbon-bre cloth is impregnated
turing technologies, says Mr Idelchik, its research chief. New with epoxy resin, shaped and cured, it can be as strong as steel
products used to begin with design, proceed to materials selec- and only half the weight. That strength comes from the powerful
tion and then to manufacture. Now it is done simultaneously. chemical bonds that form between carbon atoms. The bres can
One product of these eorts is a new industrial battery. This be aligned in dierent directions, allowing engineers to tailor the
began with research into making a battery tough enough to be strength and exibility of a composite structure precisely.
used in a hybrid locomotive. A chemistry based on nickel and The large-scale use of carbon bre began in aerospace. Both
salt provided the required energy density and robustness. Yet Airbus and Boeing aircraft use it extensively instead of alumi-
making it work in the laboratory is one thing, commercialising nium. Not only is it lighter, there is also a big manufacturing ad-
the tricky processes involved to mass-produce the battery quite vantage: large sections, like the main area of a wing, can be made
another. So GE sets up pilot production lines to learn how to put in one go rather than being riveted together from lots of individ-
promising ideas into action before building a factory. Some ideas ual components.
fail at this stage, others y.
The battery is one that has taken o. Besides hybrid trains it Look, no hands
is also suitable for other hybrid vehicles, such as fork lifts, as well It is the strength, lightness and potential saving on manual
as applications like providing back-up power for data centres labour oered by carbon bre that makes the material attractive
and to power telecoms masts in remote places. It will be made in for a variety of products. McLaren, a British Formula 1 (F1) team,
a new $100m facility near Niskayuna so that researchers are on was the rst to use an F1 car with a carbon-bre structure. John
hand to continue development. The battery itself consists of a Watson drove it to win the 1981 British Grand Prix at Silverstone.
set of standard cells which go into modules that can be connect- Later that year, in dramatic fashion, he demonstrated its ability to
ed together for dierent applications. The modules take up half withstand crashes when he emerged unharmed from a pile-up
the space of an equivalent lead-acid battery, are only about a at Monza. Within a few years every F1 team was racing carbon- 1
2 based cars. But building them, largely by react with sunlight to break down organic dirt. The material is
hand, could take 3,000 man-hours. also hydrophilic, attracting rain as a sheet of water that washes
Now it takes just four hours to build o the residue. Pilkington, a British company, was the rst to
the carbon-bre chassis and underbody launch self-cleaning glass using this technology in 2001.
of the MP4-12C, a $275,000 sports car A trawl through the research laboratories at MIT provides
which McLaren launched in 2011 to com- many more examples of future products that might use nanopar-
pete with arch-rival Ferrari on the road as ticles. Among the things Kripa Varanasi and his colleagues are
well as on the track. The MP4-12C is built looking at are materials that are extremely water-repellent.
in a clinically clean new factory built next These can be used to make superhydrophobic coatings that
to McLaren’s base in Woking, west of Lon- would greatly improve the eciency and durability of machines
don. Eventually the company will manu- like steam turbines and desalination plants, says Mr Varanasi.
facture a range of road cars using carbon Such coatings might also be applied to existing steam turbines,
bre. It will get there faster thanks to the which generate most of the world’s electricity. That could be-
development of a partly automated tech- come a big retrot business, reckons Mr Varanasi.
nique for pressing the material in a mould Nature already uses materials with nanoscale structures to
and injecting epoxy resin into it under great eect. The fossils that attracted the interest of Angela
pressure. This was pioneered jointly with Belcher were formed some 500m years ago when soft-bodied or-
Carbo Tech, an Austrian rm that special- ganisms in the sea began using minerals to grow hard materials
ises in composites. in the form of shells and bone. These natural products contain
Like many technologies pioneered exquisite nanostructures, like the iridescent shells of abalone,
by motor sport, carbon bre is now trick- says Ms Belcher. If creatures have the ability to make materials
ling down from supercars into more like that in their DNA, she concluded, it should be possible to em-
everyday models. BMW, for one, is ulate it. That is what her research group at MIT is now trying to
launching a new range of electric and hy- do, using genetic engineering.
brid models which use carbon-bre bo-
Increasingly, Odd though it may seem, one of Ms Belcher’s projects in-
dies. The rst, a small urban electric car product volves using viruses to make batteries. Virusesusually the sort
called the BMW i3, will be assembled at a that infect bacteria and are harmless to humansare a fairly
new factory in Leipzig from next year. A
engineering common tool in genetic engineering. To begin with, Ms Belcher
carbon-bre car, being lightweight, will will begin and her colleagues genetically engineer the viruses to interact or
get more mileage out of its battery than a bind with materials they are interested in. As they do not have
heavier steel one. It might even prove
at the millions of years to wait, they employ what amounts to a high-
stronger in crash tests. nanoscale. speed Darwinian process: making a billion viruses at a time, se-
Another surprisingly strong materi- lecting those with promise and repeating the process until they
al could be made from what people
Nanotech- get a strain capable of doing what they want.
throw out. Arthur Huang, the co-founder nology is The team has developed viruses that can produce the ele-
of Miniwiz Sustainable Energy Develop- ments of a battery, such as the cathode and anode, and used
ment, based in Taiwan, trained as an ar-
already used them to make small button-cells, like those that power a watch,
chitect in America. He is making building to enhance but the process has the potential to be scaled up. What makes the
materials from re-engineered rubbish. technology so attractive, says Ms Belcher, is that it is cheap, uses
One product, Polli-Brick, is a block resem-
some non-toxic materials and is environmentally friendly.
bling a square bottle made from recycled products Two companies founded by Ms Belcher are already making
PET plastic, which is widely used to make things with viruses. Cambrios Technologies is producing trans-
food and drink containers. Because of parent coatings for touch screens and Siluria Technologies (Ms
their shape, Polli-Bricks can lock together without any adhesive Belcher likes to name her companies after geological time spans)
to form structures such as walls. These, says Mr Huang, are is using viruses to develop catalysts for turning natural gas into
strong enough to withstand a hurricane, but greatly reduce the oil and plastics. There are also potential applications in solar
carbon footprint of a building and are about a quarter of the cells, medical diagnostics and cancer treatment. And all that
price of traditional building materials. Moreover, as they are from an idea inspired by a sea shell.
translucent they can have LED lighting incorporated in them. One of the people at MIT with whom Ms Belcher is work-
ing is Gerbrand Ceder, a battery expert who felt that there had to
A concrete advantage be an easier way to nd out about materials than the present
Another of Mr Huang’s materials is a natural bonding long-winded process. The information on ten dierent proper-
agent extracted from discarded rice husks. This can also be added ties of a material might be scattered in ten dierent places. To
to help set concrete. The idea is not exactly new; as Mr Huang bring it all together in one place, Mr Ceder and his colleagues, in
points out, something similar was added to the mortar used to conjunction with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
build the Great Wall of China. He thinks mainland China with its late last year launched a free online service called the Materials
building boom could once again be a big market for this product. Project to catalogue the properties of substances. By March this
A similar material can be extracted from the barley husks left year it contained details of almost 20,000 dierent compounds.
over from brewing. Mr Huang’s vision is for the system to be The database is designed to allow scientists quickly to iden-
used in local communities to turn rubbish into useful products. tify suitable new materials and predict how they might react to-
Increasingly, product engineering will begin at the nano- gether. This promises to speed up the development of new mat-
scale. Nanotechnology is already used to enhance some pro- erials in manufacturing. Some new substances can take a decade
ducts. Titanium dioxide, for instance, is used to produce self- or more to reach the market. Because it takes so long, people are
cleaning glass in buildings. A lm of it only a few nanometres wary about investing in it, says Mr Ceder. So we have to make
thick is thin enough to be seen through yet powerful enough to the process faster. 7
Additive manufacturing
Solid print
2 Many companies are now wondering about the eect that close. The size of a large refrigerator, it is capable of both subtrac-
additive manufacturing will have on their business. Some are tive and additive manufacturing. It uses a laser-based deposition
taking the technology very seriously; GE, for one, is exploring system to build a basic shape which is nished by machining.
how it might use 3D printing in all its operations. It already has The Replicator, as bets its name, is also capable of reverse engi-
one product in the pipeline, in the form of a small ultrasound neering by digitally scanning an object placed inside it to pro-
scanner. Such scanners are used by doctors to produce an image duce the data needed to build an exact replica.
of features inside the body, such as unborn babies. The size, The Replicator is as near as current technology can get to
weight and cost of the imaging consoles has shrunk, but the the teleporter of science ction. It could scan an object in one
transducer probe which is placed on the body has remained place and tell another machine on the other side of the world
largely unchanged and is now the most costly part of the system. how to build a copy. That means, for instance, that urgently need-
The probe transmits pulses of high-frequency sound and re- ed spares could be produced in remote places without having to
ceives signals back, using the reections to produce images. It ship anything. Even parts that are no longer available could be
contains tiny piezoelectric structures that are made by painstak- replicated, by scanning a broken item, repairing it virtually and
ingly micro-machining a brittle block of ceramic material. then printing a new one. The chances are, though, that digital li-
Now GE has developed an additive system to print the braries will appear online for parts and products that are no lon-
transducer. This will greatly reduce production costs and allow ger available. Just as the emergence of e-books means books may
new, inexpensive portable scanners to be developed, not only never go out of print, components could always remain avail-
for medical use but also to inspect critical aerospace and indus- able. Service mechanics could have portable 3D printers in their
trial structures for cracks. vans, or hardware stores could oer part-printing services.
3D printers would also be invaluable in remote areas. Deon
Repeat after me de Beer of Vaal University of Technology near Johannesburg is
How far could this technology go? Mr Idelchik, of GE Glo- working on a project called the Idea 2 Product Lab which uses
bal Research, has his sights set high: One day we will print an low-cost 3D printers for training and to spark an interest in design
engine. But a number of manufacturers, such as GE and Rolls- and manufacturing among students. When setting up a similar
Royce, believe that some form of hybrid printing system will lab at one of the college’s satellite campuses at Upington, a large-
emerge. This would produce the outline of a shape, thus saving ly rural area in the Northern Cape, his team found itself short of a
on material, which can then be machined for precision. particular type of at spanner. Rather than waiting days for the
The Replicator, a robotic rapid-manufacturing system correct tool to be delivered, it printed one and completed the job.
made by Cybaman Technologies, a British rm, already gets Instead of a spanner this could have been a small plastic 1
Layer by layer
How 3D printers work
USING A 3D PRINTER is like printing a letter; print medium. The powder can be spread as operating in a vacuum. And these are only
hit the print button on a computer screen a thin layer onto the build tray and solidi- some of the variations.
and a digital le is sent to, say, an inkjet ed with a squirt of liquid binder. It can also For complicated structures that
printer which deposits a layer of ink on the be melted into the required pattern with a contain voids and overhangs, gels and
surface of a piece of paper to create an laser in a process called laser sintering, a other materials are added to provide sup-
image in two dimensions. In 3D printing, technology which EOS, a German rm, uses port, or the space can be left lled with
however, the software takes a series of in its additive-manufacturing machines. powder that has not been fused. This sup-
digital slices through a computer-aided Arcam, a Swedish company, fuses the pow- port material can be washed out or blown
design and sends descriptions of those der in its printers with an electron beam away later. The materials that can be
slices to the 3D printer, which adds succes- printed now range from numerous plastics
sive thin layers until a solid object emerges. to metals, ceramics and rubber-like sub-
The big dierence is that the ink a 3D stances. Some machines can combine
printer uses is a material. materials, making an object rigid at one
The layers can come together in a end and soft at the other.
variety of ways. Some 3D printers use an Some researchers are already using 3D
inkjet process. Objet, an Israeli 3D-printer printers to produce simple living tissues,
company, uses the inkjet head to spray an such as skin, muscle and short stretches of
ultra-thin layer of liquid plastic onto a build blood vessels. There is a possibility that
tray. The layer is cured by exposure to larger body parts, like kidneys, livers and
ultraviolet light. The build tray is then even hearts, could one day be printedand
lowered fractionally and the next layer if the bio-printers can use the patient’s own
added. Another way is fused deposition stem cells, his body would be less likely to
modelling, a system used by Stratasys, a reject the printed organs after a transplant.
company based in Minneapolis. This in- Food can be printed too. Researchers
volves melting plastic in an extrusion head at Cornell University have already succeed-
to deposit a thin lament of material to ed in printing cupcakes. The killer app
build the layers. with food, almost everyone agrees, will be
Other systems use powders as the printing chocolate.
2 own prices. Some designs can be custo- easier for traditional manufacturers by allowing them to buy
mised by buyers, for example by putting parts and assemblies from all over the world. One online group,
their initials on cuinks. Atlanta-based MFG.com, provides a cornucopia of manufactur-
Easy online access to 3D printing has ing services with more than 200,000 members in 50 countries.
three big implications for manufacturing, Firms use it to connect and collaborate, uploading digital de-
says Peter Weijmarshausen, Shapeways’ signs, getting quotes and rating the services provided. In some
chief executive. The rst is speed to mar- ways, online manufacturing communities like this could turn
ket: Shapeways had covers for iPads on into the virtual equivalent of an industrial cluster.
sale just four days after Apple rst As online services and software spread more widely, they
launched the device in 2010. Second, the will also allow customers to take part in the production process.
risk of going to market falls to almost zero For instance, Dassault Systèmes, a French software rm, has
because entrepreneurs can test ideas be- created an online virtual environment in which employees, sup-
fore scaling up and tweak the designs in pliers and consumers can work together to turn new ideas into
response to feedback from buyers. Some reality. It even provides lifelike manikins on which to try out new
Shapeways products go through 20-30 it- things. The way products might fail, how they could be xed and
erations a year. And third, it becomes pos- how they can be taken apart for disposal can also be modelled
sible to produce things that cannot be by computers. Software rms call such services product life-cy-
made in other ways, usually because they cle management because they extend computer modelling
are too intricate to be machined. from the conception of a product to its demise, which nowadays
means recycling.
Can you imagine? Just as digitisation has freed some people from working in
There are plenty of surprises in an oce, the same will happen in manufacturing. Product de-
what people come up with. Recent exam- sign and simulation can now be done on a personal computer
ples include curious crablike walking de- and accessed via the cloud with devices such as smartphones,
vices, some propelled by a small wind- says Mr Rochelle of Autodesk, the Silicon Valley software com-
mill, designed by Theo Jansen, a Dutch pany. It means designers and engineers can work on a product
artist (the Dutch seem to have a natural af- and share ideas with others from anywhere. What does this do
nity with 3D printing). These are printed for manufacturing? The way Mr Rochelle sees it, it means the
in one go, complete with all the moving factory of the future could be me, sitting in my home oce. 7
parts. If you give people access to cre-
ative technology in a way that is not scary
they will nd ways to use it that you can- Automation
not imagine, says Mr Weijmarshausen.
And that technology is becoming easier
to use all the time. When Shapeways be-
Making the future
gan, half the les uploaded could not be
printed because of mistakes or faults.
Now the success rate has gone up to 91%,
thanks to software that automatically
xes problems.
How robots and people team up to manufacture
Rajeev Kulkarni, who runs 3D Sys-
tems’ consumer business, wants his things in new ways
rm’s rst consumer 3D printer to be sim- BACK IN THE 1980s, when America’s carmakers feared
ple enough for children to use. Cubify, its they might be overwhelmed by Japanese competitors,
online consumer service, also provides many in Detroit had a vision of beating their rivals with lights-
3D printing and e-commerce, and is form- out manufacturing. The idea was that factories would become
ing partnerships with organisations such so highly automated that the lights could be turned o and the
as Freedom Of Creation, a design group robots left to build cars on their own. It never happened. Japan’s
that specialises in 3D-printed products. advantage, it turned out, lay not in automation but in lean-pro-
Once in digital form, things become duction techniques, which are mostly people-based.
easy to copy. This means protecting intel- Many of the new production methods in this next revolu-
lectual property will be just as hard as it is tion will require fewer people working on the factory oor.
in other industries that have gone digital. Thanks to smarter and more dexterous robots, some lights-out
Online content will need checking for in- manufacturing is now possible. FANUC, a big Japanese pro-
fringements, says Mr Kulkarni. And there ducer of industrial robots, has automated some of its production
will be some tricky areas. For instance, lines to the point where they can run unsupervised for several
what happens if a visitor to Disney World weeks. Many other factories use processes such as laser cutting
in Florida takes a series of pictures of Cin- and injection moulding that operate without any human inter-
derella’s castle, converts them into a 3D vention. And additive manufacturing machines can be left alone
digital le and uses that to print and sell to print day and night.
models of the castle online? Mr Kulkarni Yet manufacturing will still need people, if not so many in
is relaxed: It is something we will have to the factory itself. All these automated machines require some-
gure out, but it should not be a hurdle to one to service them and tell them what to do. Some machine op-
innovation. erators will become machine minders, which often calls for a
The internet is already making life broader range of skills. And certain tasks, such as assembling 1
2 components, remain too ddly for robots to do well, which is by the mass-market carmakers.
why assembly is often subcontracted to low-wage countries. There will also be some super- Offer to readers
Industrial robots are getting better at assembly, but they are high-tech factories, like those of Reprints of this special report are available.
A minimum order of five copies is required.
expensive and need human experts to set them up (who can cost GE and Rolls-Royce, that make Please contact: Jill Kaletha at Foster Printing
more than the robot). They have a long way to go before they can smaller quantities of highly Tel +00(1) 219 879 9144
replace people in many areas of manufacturing. Investing in ro- specialised products such as jet e-mail: jillk@fosterprinting.com
bots can be worthwhile for mass manufacturers like carmakers, engines. There will be millions Corporate offer
who remain the biggest users of such machines, but even in of small and medium-sized Corporate orders of 100 copies or more are
highly automated car factories people still do most of the nal rms that will benet from new available. We also offer a customisation
assembly. And for small and medium-sized businesses robots materials, cheaper robots, service. Please contact us to discuss your
are generally too costly and too inexible. smarter software, an abun- requirements.
Tel +44 (0)20 7576 8148
But the next generation of robots will be dierent. Not only dance of online services and 3D e-mail: rights@economist.com
will they be cheaper and easier to set up, they will work with printers that can economically
For more information on how to order special
people rather than replacing them. They will fetch and carry produce things in small num- reports, reprints or any copyright queries
parts, hold things, pick up tools, sort items, clean up and make bers. And there will be count- you may have, please contact:
themselves useful in myriad other ways. less entrepreneurs in little work- The Rights and Syndication Department
Various eorts are under way to produce such robots, espe- shops, homes and, no doubt, 26 Red Lion Square
cially for smaller companies. Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute, garages who will be able to do London WC1R 4HQ
for instance, is involved in a European initiative to develop ro- things they could never have Tel +44 (0)20 7576 8148
Fax +44 (0)20 7576 8492
bots that are safe enough to operate alongside workers (at pre- done before. e-mail: rights@economist.com
sent, most industrial robots still have to be caged in case they ac- www.economist.com/rights
cidentally hit someone) and capable of understanding simple Getting there
Future special reports
instructions, including voice commands. Manufacturing revolu-
The present generation of factory robots is akin to early tions never happen overnight, International banking May 19th
China’s economy May 26th
mainframe computers in oces, reckons Rodney Brooks, a co- but this one is already well un- The Arctic June 16th
founder of iRobot, an American rm whose products include der way. There is enough trans- London June 30th
the Roomba, a robotic vaccum-cleaner, as well as military robots. formative research going on in
Those big computers were run by experts, a long way away from the biological sciences and in Previous special reports and a list of
forthcoming ones can be found online:
most users, until personal computers arrived. But the PC didn’t nanotechnology to spawn en- economist.com/specialreports
get rid of oce workers, it changed the tasks they did, says Mr tirely new industries, like mak-
Brooks. Often that meant doing more so- ing batteries from viruses. And
phisticated work. In 2008 he founded if the use of carbon-bre composites were to spread from sports
Heartland Robotics to produce a range of cars to more workaday models, the huge steel-stamping presses
machines that would serve as the equiva- and robot welding lines would vanish from car factories.
lent of the PC in robotics. Additive manufacturing, like anything else digital, is al-
Mr Brooks’s lips are sealed about ready becoming both cheaper and more eective. The big break-
what these machines will be like, al- through would be in workow. At present 3D printers make
though his views about the future of ro- things one at a time or in small batches. But if they could work in
botics provides a clue. As Toyota discov- a continuous processlike the pill-making machine in the No-
ered with lean manufacturing, product- vartis-MIT laboratorythey could be used on a moving produc-
ion-line workers, given the chance, can tion line. The aim would be to build things faster and more ex-
come up with plenty of good ideas to im- ibly rather than to achieve economies of scale. Such a line could
prove productivity. If people on the fac- be used to build products that are too big to t into existing 3D
tory oor or in workshops are provided printers and, because the machine is digitally controlled, a dier-
with easy-to-use robots they can become ent item could be built on each platform, making mass customi-
more productive, says Mr Brooks. Bring to-
gether these new robots with innovative
manufacturing technologies, and you Millions of small and medium-sized rms will benet
could get a manufacturing renaissance.
That would make things easier for
from new materials, cheaper robots, smarter software,
start-ups, but scaling up is notoriously dif- an abundance of online services and 3D printers
cult because the capital costs of equip-
ping a factory are often too high for inves-
tors to stomach, or the payback period is too long. In some sation possible. That would allow the technology to take o.
businesses advanced production technologies could bring Can it be done? Back to the EuroMold exhibition, where
down those costs, reckons Martin Schmidt, an electrical-engi- TNO, an independent research group based in the Netherlands,
neering expert at MIT. Mr Schmidt has started a number of com- showed a novel machine with 100 platforms travelling around a
panies that make tiny devices such as miniature sensors. He carousel in a continuous loop. A variety of 3D-printing heads
thinks that the production equipment for such devices might be would deposit plastics, metals or ceramics onto each platform as
shrunk too, even to tabletop size, cutting capital costs. In indus- they pass to make complete products, layer by layer. Scale up the
tries where that happens, says Mr Schmidt, I think we will see idea, straighten out the carousel and you have a production line
some disruption. with multiple printing heads.
Mass-produced goods will continue to be made in factories The Hammering Man outside the Frankfurt Messe is still
using traditional subtractive methods for a long time yet, al- bashing away at his piece of metal. But in a decade or two visi-
though with increasing automation and exibility, as practised tors to future industrial fairs may wonder what he is doing. 7