One impetus for this site is a feeling that has been growing in me for some time: many of us just have too much stuff (while a great deal of the Earth’s population simply do not have enough).  This is not to say that I am a minimalist, but rather that decades of mass production have forced us to compromise quality for quantity.  While this is true in our personal lives, it also extends to industry, as well as beyond the physical domain and into the digital world.  Our closets, storage rooms and applications folders show that we spend far too much money, time and effort on things that rarely generate any utility.  In times of increasing strain on resources, eventually this trend has to stop.

In my MBA thesis at London Business School, I started to examine the premise that one of the next major shifts in our world is personalized production through the use of additive manufacturing, or 3D printing.  For me, additive manufacturing is just a small piece of a larger story that will change the way that we look at products.  I don’t believe mass production is going to go away anytime soon, but I do think that barriers that previously existed towards specialization will start to fall away through innovation and technological progress.

With this shift, there are huge opportunities for new start-ups and the venture capital firms that fund them.  This site will highlight those innovators and help explain how they are changing our world.