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We are entering a new era in additive manufacturing, or "3-D printing." It has major implications for the adoption of the technology and for the choices of business models available to companies that take the plunge, says the author. Advances in the technology's capabilities and expansion of the available materials and the supplier ecosystem have made it possible to produce a much broader range of affordable things--from the soles of running shoes to turbine blades--and, in many cases, in much higher volumes. As a result, 3-D printing is moving from a limited role (such as prototyping and making conventional machine tools) to a central place in manufacturing for a growing number of industries. Strategically, that means additive is becoming a full-fledged competitive weapon: It can be used to hold on to market leadership, to dethrone the dominant player, and to diversify by exploiting a printer's capability to make products for different industries. Consequently, leaders need to understand additive's capability and potential and the choices open to them in the near future. This article presents them with a playbook and explores six possible business models that have emerged.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Digital technology has already upended the media and information sectors. It's about to do the same to the manufacturing economy, and pave the way for what can be called the "pan-industrial"strategy.

The use of 3-D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, has moved well beyond prototyping, rapid tooling, trinkets, and toys. Companies such as GE, Lockheed Martin, and BMW are switching to it for industrial production at scale. More companies will follow as the range of printable materials continues to expand. Already available are basic plastics, photosensitive resins, ceramics, cement, glass, numerous metals, thermoplastic composites (some infused with carbon nanotubes and fibers), and even stem cells. In this article the author makes the case that additive manufacturing will gain ground quickly given advantages including greater flexibility, fewer assembly steps and other cost savings, and enhanced product design possibilities. Managers, he writes, should now be engaging with strategic questions on three levels: (1) Sellers of tangible products should ask how their offerings could be improved, whether by themselves or by competitors. (2) Industrial enterprises should revisit their operations to determine what network of supply chain assets and what mix of old and new processes will be optimal. (3) Leaders must consider the strategic implications as whole commercial ecosystems begin to form around the new realities of 3-D printing. Many of the biggest players already in the business of additive manufacturing are vying to develop the platforms on which other companies will build and connect. Platform owners will be powerful because production itself is likely to become commoditized over time. Those facilitating connections in the digital ecosystem will sit in the middle of a tremendous volume of industrial transactions, collecting and selling valuable information.

3-D printing, also known as additive printing, is ushering in a new era--of flexible, just-in-time, customized manufacturing. And as it revolutionizes manufacturing, it will tip the East-West balance, so that China is no longer the manufacturing powerhouse of the world.

Every country's economy is a mix, but usually one group--producers or consumers--gets favored through tax breaks or subsidies. China and the U.S. stand at opposite extremes. If the U.S. economy is to get stronger, it should emulate Germany, which has a more balanced set of economic policies. Tariffs are high enough to protect German producers from Asian rivals but low enough to prevent them from becoming complacent. Taxes on fossil fuels go to support R&D in value-added manufacturing and clean energy sectors.

A price-benefit positioning map helps you see, through your customers' eyes, how your product compares with all its competitors in a market. You can draw such a map quickly and objectively, without having to resort to costly, time-consuming consumer surveys or subjective estimates of the excellence of your product and the shortcomings of all the others. Creating a positioning map involves three steps. First, define your market to include everything your customers might consider to be your product's competitors or substitutes. Second, track the price your customers actually pay (wholesale or retail? bundled or unbundled?) and identify what your customers see as your offering's primary benefit. This is done through regression analysis, determining which of the product's attributes (as described objectively by rating services, government agencies, R&D departments, and the like) explains most of the variance in its price. Third, draw the map by plotting on a graph the position of every product in the market you've selected according to its price and its level of primary benefit, and draw a line that runs through the middle of the points. What you get is a picture of the competitive landscape of your market, where all the products above the line command a price premium owing to some secondary benefit customers value, and all those below the line are positioned to earn market share through lower prices and reduced secondary benefits. Using examples as varied as Harley-Davidson motorcycles, Motorola cell phones, and the New York restaurant market, Tuck professor D'Aveni demonstrates some of the many ways the maps can be used: to locate unoccupied or less-crowded spaces in highly competitive markets, for instance, or to identify opportunities created through changes in the relationship between the primary benefit and prices. The maps even allow companies to anticipate--and counter--rivals' strategies.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Traditional models for developing and managing corporate portfolios are based on financial frameworks, business synergies, or leveraging core competencies into related businesses. In this article, the author goes beyond those traditional approaches and offers an alternative--the corporate sphere of influence. Like nations, says the author, companies build spheres of influence that protect their cores, project their power outward to weaken rivals, and prepare the way for future moves. By recognizing the strategic purpose of each part of the portfolio, the sphere of influence model focuses attention on the company's overall strategy, including how it wants to structure the division of product and geographic markets in an industry, which threats it will address or ignore, and how the company's portfolio enhances or detracts from its competitive or alliance strategy. Thinking in terms of building a sphere of influence forces managers to draw together corporate- and business-level strategic analyses that are often treated as separate. The corporate-level concern about where to fight and the business-level concern about with whom and how to fight are brought together into a coherent view. In this article, the author defines the components of a sphere of influence and explains how senior executives can use his framework to assess their company's current sphere and map their desired one. He offers examples of how companies have managed their spheres, drawing from a wide range of industries and companies, including Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Anheuser-Busch, Nokia, Harley-Davidson, and Mexican cement company CEMEX.

Industry leaders frequently worry that their companies will fall victim to some revolutionary business model or disruptive technology. But new research shows that it's strategically better for incumbents to counter a revolution than to ignore or fully embrace it. Successful incumbents rely on one or more of five approaches to restrain, modify or, if necessary, neutralize a revolutionary threat. A company that perceives a revolution in its earliest stages can use containment strategies. By throwing up roadblocks, an incumbent can often limit the degree to which customers and competitors accept a nascent insurgency. And, sometimes, revolutions die there. If not, early containment buys a company some time to shape the revolution so that it complements, rather than supersedes, the incumbent's strengths. And even if shaping efforts fail, they can give an industry leader more time to work out how to absorb the threat by bringing the new competencies or technologies inside the firm in such a way that they don't destroy its existing strengths and capabilities. When revolutions have progressed too far to slow them down, incumbents must take a more aggressive tack. Neutralizing strategies meet a revolution head-on and terminate it--by, say, temporarily giving away the benefits offered by the challenger for free. Annulment strategies allow the market leader to leapfrog over or sidestep the threat. These five strategic approaches need not be used in isolation.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. All organizations sense competitive pressure intuitively, but most, says the author, do not do a good job of managing it. That is, in part, because it is often difficult to see the overall pressure system--a complex, shifting pattern of overlapping contacts among rivals that continually alters the climate of an industry. Illustrates how pressure systems can be mapped and controlled to a significant extent. A map based on measured pressures has important implications for an organization's market and competitor selection, growth plans, product portfolio and diversification strategy, resource allocation priorities, competitive-intelligence system, merger and acquisition strategy, and scenario-planning process. In any industry, companies can develop competitive strategies by using a pressure map to answer two critical questions: If the current pressure pattern continues, what position will my company ultimately hold? How can my company stabilize or shift the direction of pressure to reduce (or enhance) the predicted impact of the current pressure system? Through detailed discussion of different industries, the author demonstrates how pressure maps can reveal the underlying competitive dynamics of an industry. He then offers a variety of mechanisms by which organizations can and do affect their competitive landscapes.