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The research firm Gartner considers AM an important technology trend that accelerates product development, improves operations, and can create finished goods (Basiliere and Shanler 2019). The firm therefore tracks related trends and publishes it annually in its “hype cycle,” a graph where the maturity and adoption of a particular technology are charted (3ders 2017). In the 2019 revision, AM in supply chain is considered as sliding into the Trough of Disillusionment,⁹ where “interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters” (Basiliere and Shanler 2019; Gartner 2020). This is shown in Figure 4.4.

Figure 4.4 Hype cycle for AM.

Source: Based on Fenn et al. (2018) and Basiliere and Shanler (2019). © John Wiley & Sons.

Other technologies are just at the Innovation Trigger state, where early proof‐of‐concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity although no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven (Gartner 2020). For example, in nanoscale AM, parts can be produced with a depth resolution of 175 nm (Saha et al. 2019). This would allow for the production of flexible electronics, electrochemical interfaces, micro‐optics, and other micro‐ or nanostructures (Boissonneault 2019). Another technology at this maturity stage is 4D printing, a new process that entails multi‐material prints with the capability to transform over time. Here, manufactured structures are programmably active and can transform independently, instead of being simple static objects (Tibbits 2014). Furthermore, AM organ transplants (also referred to as 3D bioprinting) could open a new world of possibilities for the medical field. Instead of taking the risk of the body rejecting a transplanted organ or waiting until a suitable donor hopefully appears at some point in time, this technology would allow a patient to have an organ fabricated specifically to them to replace their faulty ones (Ng et al. 2019).