Collaboration & Innovation
At the Materialise Innovation Forum, which took place in Leuven (Belgium) last week, there was, not surprisingly, a great deal of talk about innovation and it made me think.
Innovation was discussed within a number of contexts: designers striving to design and produce the most innovative products; how innovative companies operate, and the most innovative uses of rapid product development technologies. Regardless of context however, it seems to me that when you talk about ‘innovation’ it throws up something of an anomaly; wherein it is competition that forms the main driver behind developing innovative products and companies. Competition, however, particularly between competing companies, demands a level of secrecy and withholding of information in a bid to get products to market first and claim a bigger share of that all-important pie. And yet — and this is the anomaly — the meeting last week showed me that collaboration is also a great driver of innovation in a very real way — the sharing of the very best ideas and moving industries forward, whether that be the RP&M machine manufacturers, materials specialists, auto manufacturers or medical device manufacturers, true and ethical collaboration is a really good thing for everyone involved.
Call me idealistic, but I am fully subscribing to this idea. And credit must be given to Materialise for hosting the Forum. I mentioned in the magazine last year that this company advocates and upholds really strong ethics. That view has been reinforced even more strongly this year.
Rachel Park
1 Comments - Click to Add Your Comment:
Hi Rachel,
I think you´re right in many points. By means of performance and user friendly machine design there is a lot more to do in order to bring desktopfabbers into home offices and this will be one of the most pioneering innovations. But there are two different directions with different demands in which additive processing is developing - manufacturing for production use (reproducibility and materials) and fabbing (costs, size and usability). I always try to keep the state of the art up to date in my personal blog (http://www.rietzeldominik.de/blog/) and there is a lot going on at the moment I think.
In total there will be a paradigm change in the future - not only for designers as the possibility to print 3D will become more and more real and thus having an understanding for 3D-design and possibilities...
But it will still be a challenge for all of us to innovate in the next years!
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