The Beating Heart of Untapped Business Opportunities for Additive Manufacturing

This article presents a case that joins user-driven innovation and additive manufacturing (AM) towards latent business opportunities in the preparation for life threatening operations. Surgeons, confronted with a patient with a delicate heart condition, collaborated with a prototyping facility to print a realistic 3D model of the patient's aortic aneurysm. The model allowed the surgeons to first study and then experiment to determine the most effective operation procedure before the actual operation, which shortened the surgery time by approximately 70%. Reducing surgery time creates two forms of value: improving patient outcomes and reducing costs. Shorter times under anesthetic and on cardiopulmonary bypass correlate with better surgical results. Reducing healthcare costs brings broad societal benefits in both publicly and privately funded healthcare systems. We outline a case for makerspaces to capture value by joining their expertise and manufacturing equipment with the needs of nearby healthcare systems for novel business developments.