Additive Manufacturing as Game Changer Technology in the Manufacturing Sector: The Business Model’s Renewal

Additive manufacturing (AM) allows creating a product by adding the material layer by layer until achieving an end piece rather than using traditional technologies. The goal is to produce objects deriving from electronic data thanks to 3D printing—the most known form of AM—or other technologies. It increases the digitalization of manufacturing activities stimulating them in investing in innovative requirements and leading to major changes in the business ecosystem. It offers significant advantages allowing industries to optimize their processes, reducing the components required and the related costs. Furthermore, the capability to customize products positively affects the costs, the distribution, the market, inventories, and services related. AM can help the environment due to the potential in reducing the life cycle of materials, energy and water consumed by optimizing processes and could avoid the waste of resources. Significant benefits, strongly supported by tax and financial incentives and advantages, concern the supply chain processes and productive industries which reshore from developing to emerging countries subverting the recent opposite trend and often shifting production to the local context. AM proposes a new manufacturing concept, increasing the speed and flexibility of production. This stimulates firms to be more resilient to pivot from one component to another and promote a different balance changing the relationship with the customer and creating new and dynamic connections. This study contributes to understanding how the AM changes firms create and capture value. Based on our findings, we identify several opportunities to encourage further advances in this area.