Acting as one of the leading online 3D printing service providers, the French company Sculpteo has amassed quite the reputation across many industries for their professional-grade rapid prototyping and manufacturing capabilities. Last year, Sculpteo made use of their highly respected position in the world of additive manufacturing, and conducted a survey on over a thousand participants from a wide range of industries that are utilizing 3D printing technology. With this information, they released the “State of 3D Printing” industry report, which suggested that 3D printing was trending upwards in almost every way possible.
The survey, which was conducted online, was fully completed by 865 participants and partially completed by more than 400, all of which responses went into their industry analysis. In order to keep the results consistent with last year’s industry report, “92% of the questions are exactly the same than last year and enable a fair comparison of the results”. New additions to the survey included more categories for materials and uses, as well as five new questions to help gain insight on how additive manufacturing is helping businesses to perform and about the most used types of 3D printing technologies. Their methodology behind the survey was also quite open-ended, leaving participants with the option to select an ‘Other’-category, which enabled them to expound upon their own use case with 3D printing. Sculpteo is well aware that 3D printing is still in the early stages of development, and wanted to get as much accurate feedback from survey participants as possible.
Now that Sculpteo has given us the insight into their survey methodology and sample data, we can better understand the upcoming data on 3D printing trends and uses. This introduction to the “State of 3D Printing 2016” report might not have the most exhilarating information, but it’s important to understand who is providing this data, so that we can better understand the current uses of 3D printing technology. Sculpteo will start unveiling the current 3D printing trends found from their data in their following post, which will be published on their blog later this week. Will you be reading the report? Discuss further in the Sculpteo ‘State of 3D Printing 2016‘ forum over at 3DPB.com.
[Source: Sculpteo]