i3 - September/October 2017 - 33

By Jeremy Snow

Policy

T EC H H U B

Boston: The Home of 3D Printing

rom health care to manufacturing, 3D printing offers
certain businesses and engineers a flexible, efficient and
personalized way to create items and parts. And no city
believes in 3D printing's potential more than Boston, where
printing companies have continuously sprouted up to satisfy
the country's appetite for the new technology.

"If you need to find talent, there
is no better place than Boston," says
Eugene Giller, founder and president
of Rize. "I doubt I could find a better
team anywhere else."

A History of Printing

3D printing has deep roots in Boston.
Z Corporation, one of the leading 3D
printing companies from the 90s, sold
one of the earliest commercial 3D printers in Boston after developing it at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT). Later on, many of its workers
dispersed, joined new companies or
started their own, including Giller, who
founded his own printing company after
working at Z Corporation.
Since then, Boston companies
have been pushing the technology's
limit to help everyone from startups to
manufacturing factories. Many print
using materials beyond plastic, like
Desktop Metal, who recently
received $115 million in investments, or Voxel8, who can 3D
print electronic parts. Additionally,
NVBots can mass manufacture
more than 50,000 parts for their
customers, while the printer itself
uses cloud connectivity.
"3D printing really expanded
through the city on its own,
morphing and merging with other

markets," Giller says. "It's bringing
individualization and customization
to the process."
Other locations, like Nervous
Systems, are taking a less businessto-business approach. Founded by two
MIT grads as well, the company 3D
prints everything from custom jewelry
and art pieces to dresses and shoes.
Boston doctors are even making 3D
printed spines and brains based on
MRI scans to give surgeons new ways to
practice, according to The Boston Globe.
And at MIT, a machine complete with
solar panels, wheels and an excavator is
3D printing a huge hut-like building
out of foam and concrete that researchers say they want to put on Mars.

MIT and Beyond

What began as a niche product in high
tech labs and factories is now more com-

monplace in Boston, stretching
from public libraries all the way to
MIT classrooms, where the school offers
multiple 3D printing classes. AJ Perez,
chairman and co-founder of NVRobots,
co-developed the first graduate level
3D printing class for the mechanical
engineering department at MIT.
"If you look around, you could find
one, maybe two, of the biggest names
in 3D printing that are not in Boston,"
Perez says. "The rest are at MIT."
Unlike some other 3D printing
classes, MIT's go beyond printing
basics, teaching students the physics
behind the technology in order to
overcome its shortcomings and expand
the form. And with industry leaders
acting as professors, the university
primes students to join one of the city's
many companies or start their own.
Perez is also working to expose
kids to 3D printing before college, and
developed a class to teach younger children design and engineering through
printing. The next step is to go even
farther, Perez says. With a larger technology budget for schools and communities, Boston could guarantee 3D
printing becomes a city mainstay.

Formlabs offers complete
desktop systems.

A FEW NOTABLE BOSTON 3D PRINTING COMPANIES
Desktop Metal

Formlabs

Markforged

NVBots

Rize

Voxel8

Cost-efficient
metal printing

High-resolution
laser-sharp
printers

Printers for
a variety
of materials

Printers with
cloud connectivity

Versatile printer
meant for an
office or lab

Prints custom
electronic parts

C TA . t e c h / i 3

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2017

http://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/ http://www.rize3d.com http://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/ http://www.desktopmetal.com http://www.voxel8.com http://nvbots.com http://www.desktopmetal.com http://markforged.com http://nvbots.com http://www.rize3d.com http://www.voxel8.com http://formlabs.com http://www.cta.tech.com

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