“He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War
There are a lot of ways to interpret this little piece of ancient wisdom but, when it comes to additive manufacturing (AM), I think the best way is to take it as equivalent to the much more modern aphorism: Stay in your lane. It’s taken the 3D printing industry almost four decades to figure out what that lane looks like and, thus far, it doesn’t appear to include a big off-ramp for volume production.
