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.