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This was the birth of Made in Space, our first off-world 3-D printing company and a great example of exponential entrepreneurship. Their entire business model is based on exponential development curves. Their first offering, launched to the ISS in the fall of 2014, is the simplest: a 3-D printer that prints plastic parts.

In itself, this will bring on a manufacturing revolution of sorts. “The first 3-D printers on the ISS will be able to build objects that could never be manufactured on Earth,” says Kemmer. “Imagine, for example, building a structure that couldn't withstand its own weight.”

Following out the exponential curves a tiny bit further, Made in Space's next iteration is an advanced materials and multiple materials 3-D printer—which means that some time in the next five years 60 percent of the parts in use on the ISS will be printable. And just behind this version is the real game changer: a 3-D printer capable of printing electronics.

Consider the latest trend in satellite technology: CubeSats. These are tiny satellites weighing only a kilogram made in the shape of a ten-centimeter cube. They're so simple to build that almost anyone can pull it off (free instructions are available online), yet they can be deceptively powerful when deployed as a swarm, often taking the place of
much bigger satellites. CubeSats themselves are cheap to make (about $5,000 to $8,000).
¹⁹
Launching them is the real expense (still tens of thousands of dollars). But that's today. If we wait a few more years, Made in Space can solve this problem for pennies on the dollar.

“Turns out,” says Dunn, “the ISS [is] a perfect platform for launching things into low-Earth orbit. Already our printers can print the cube portion of a CubeSat, and we've also printed the electronics in our lab. It's hard to say for sure, but around 2025, we should be able to print electronics aboard the ISS. This means we'll be able to email hardware into space for free, rather than paying to have it launched there.”

Of course, the big dream is to be able to create 3-D printers capable of printing entire space stations in space and, even better, to do it with materials mined from space. Once this becomes possible, the creation of legitimate off-world habitats (i.e., space colonies) becomes a viable reality.

“Imagine being able to colonize a distant planet by bringing nothing but a 3-D printer and some mining equipment,” says Mike Chen. “It might sound like science fiction, but the first steps toward making it a reality are happening in our lab right now, and aboard the ISS.”

What does this all mean? It means that while Made in Space started off disrupting a billion-dollar spare parts industry, the exponential growth curves that underpin their business model lead them directly toward first mover advantage in the multitrillion-dollar industry that will eventually be off-world living.

Perhaps you're thinking Made in Space is more the entrepreneurial exception than the rule. After all, Kemmer, Dunn, and Chen might not have known much about 3-D printing, but they were already students at Singularity University, giving them both access to the technology (there are 3-D printers on site) and exposure to all these exponential ideas. But that wasn't the case with Alice Taylor, a British designer who
had none of these advantages yet has already made considerable progress toward disrupting the $3.5 billion doll segment of the $34 billion toy industry.
²⁰

Taylor spent her career in digital media, first as a website creator, later on the digital side of the BBC, and finally as the commissioning editor for education at Channel 4 in London, where much of her job was to make award-winning educational video games.
²¹
Her interest in games led to an interest in toys, which led her to the doll industry—another linear business ripe for disruption.

Over the past thirty years, the toy business has been transformed. A once-domestic enterprise populated by individual artisans has morphed into a handful of large corporations using overseas mass manufacturers. To be competitive, dolls need to be made in bulk, using an injection mold process that requires one mold for each doll part. Given that each mold can cost tens of thousands of dollars to create, the start-up costs for a single doll can run you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But maybe not.

Taylor is married to the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, who knew a little about 3-D printing. (Doctorow, in a sad bit of prophecy, wrote a 2009 book,
Makers
, about how 3-D printers were being used by criminals and terrorists to make AK-47s.)
²²
She decided to see if 3-D printing offered an alternative to the traditional—that is, expensive and mass produced—making of dolls. In essence, Taylor set out to see if Roger's third industrial revolution could be applied to toys, as well as cars and rockets.

“The problem,” explains Taylor, “was I didn't know much of anything about 3-D printing. So I went to the forum section of
Shapeways.com
(a 3-D printing marketplace) and found a guy who had posted: ‘I can 3-D model for 3-D printing. Hire me.' So I did.” Taylor emailed her doll sketches and got a 3-D model back, then printed a real doll from the file. “It was eighteen centimeters high, had no eyes, no hair, and cost me two hundred and twenty pounds, but it existed. It was magical—I just made a doll. I'd never made a doll in my life. I had the same feeling of awe and potential that I had
in the early days of the Internet. So I went home and quit my job and set out to build MakieLabs—a company that would allow anyone to custom-design and print a doll.”

These days, MakieLabs is entirely powered by 3-D printers. “In our offices we have three small MakerBot printers for prototyping,” explains Taylor. “Once the design is right, we then print the final product using large 3D Systems printers on the cloud. We avoid both the huge capital expense required by tooling and, by using on-demand cloud printing, we don't need to buy the large production 3-D printers ourselves. All of our packing, shipping, and marketing can now be virtualized. We don't have warehouse costs, don't need to travel back and forth to the Far East. We don't even need to print our packaging in large batches. We print them as we need them.”

Taylor also sees dolls as only the beginning. “Any industry where the end product can be customized is vulnerable,” she says. “A doll is just a 3-D shape. But so are a dinosaur, a robot, and a car. We're moving to a world of one-stop manufacturing. We'll either have these tools in our homes and offices or we'll rent them via the cloud. We're at the front end of a very creative time—a great time for disruptive entrepreneurs.”

As a way of closing out this chapter, and to provide you with a clearer view of what other industries are immediately ripe for exponential disruption via 3-D printing, take a look at the chart
here
. It's an analysis by Deloitte Consulting that highlights several of the areas currently experiencing the heaviest 3-D impact and thus ripe with the most entrepreneurial possibility.

In the last chapter, we took a closer look at exponential growth and entrepreneurial possibility through the lens of additive manufacturing. Yet 3-D printing is only one of the many powerful exponential technologies now moving from deception to disruption. In this chapter, we'll overview five more technologies also ripe for entrepreneurial exploitation: networks and sensors, infinite computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and synthetic biology. Our aim is to highlight the fundamentals: Where this technology is today, where it will be in a few years from now, and where the hidden opportunities are—areas currently off the radar yet poised for explosion over the next three to five years.

A network is any interconnection of signals and information—the human brain and the Internet being the two most prominent examples.
A sensor is a device that detects information—temperature, vibration, radiation, etc.—and when hooked up to the network, can also transmit that information. Right now, both sectors are exploding.

Global Mobile Devices and Connections

Global Mobile Devices and Connections

Source:
https://www.mauldineconomics.com/bulls-eye/

There are over seven billion smartphones and tablets in existence. Each of these devices is a mix of sensors—pressure-sensitive touch screens, microphones, accelerometers, magnetometers, gyros, cameras—that are increasing in number with every new generation of technology. Consider capacitive touch screens—like those found in iPads and iPhones. In 2012, the total area covered by these sensors was 12 million square meters, or enough to blanket two thousand football fields. By 2015, that number will balloon to 35.9 million square meters, or enough to overlay half of Manhattan.
¹

And it's not just communication devices. A similar pattern is playing out in all our “things,” transforming a world that was once passive and dumb into one that is active and smart. Take the transportation sector. Today there are sensors in our cars to help us navigate, in our
roads to help us avoid traffic jams, and in our parking lots to help us find open spaces. Commercial aircraft are also in the mix. General Electric—which manufactures and leases jet engines to all major airlines—now puts up to 250 sensors in each of their 5,000 leased engines,
²
allowing their health to be monitored in real time, even in midflight. And if the readings fall outside of prescribed levels, GE can swoop in and do a preemptive fix.

Security-related sensors have also exploded onto the scene. Today's all-pervasive video surveillance cameras, now coupled to databases stocked with 120 million facial images, give law enforcement unprecedented search capability. But beyond looking for trouble, our sensors can listen as well. Take ShotSpotter,
³
a gunfire detection technology that gathers data from a network of acoustic sensors placed throughout a city, filters the data through an algorithm to isolate the sound of gunfire, triangulates the location within about ten feet, then reports it directly to the police. The system is generally more accurate and more reliable than information gleaned from 911 callers.

While transportation and security are sectors primarily dominated by larger companies, this doesn't mean that entrepreneurs have not taken advantage of these same exponential trends. As a 2012
Wired
article pointed out:
⁴
“Hackers [have begun] using increasingly inexpensive sensors and open source hardware—like the Arduino controller—to add intelligence to ordinary objects.” There are now kits that let your plants tweet when they need to be watered, Wi-Fi-connected cow collars that let farmers know when their animals are in heat, and a beer mug that can tell you how much you've drunk during Oktoberfest. As Arduino hacker Charalampos Doukas says, as sensor prices crash downward, “The only limit is your imagination.”

To look at this from a more expansive angle, consider that we now live in a world where Google's autonomous car can cruise our streets safely because of a rooftop sensor called LIDAR—a laser-based sensing device that uses sixty-four eye-safe lasers to scan 360 degrees while concurrently generating 750 megabytes of image data per second to
help with navigation.
⁵
Pretty soon, though, we'll live in a world with, say, two million autonomous cars on our roads (not much of a stretch, as that's less than one percent of cars currently registered in the United States),
⁶
seeing and recording nearly everything they encounter, giving us near-perfect knowledge of the environment they observe. What's more, ubiquitous imaging doesn't stop there.

360-degree LIDAR imaging in Google's driverless car

Source:
http://people.bath.ac.uk/as2152/cars/lidar.jpg