WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it's not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it... Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. We built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that's to build.

Strategically, that means additive is becoming a full-fledged competitive weapon: It can be used to hold on to market leadership, to dethrone a dominant player, or to diversify by exploiting a printer’s capability to make products for different industries. Consequently, leaders need to understand additive’s range and potential and the possibilities that will open up in the near future. This article offers a playbook.

So far, 3D printing has not quite lived up to expectations. Skeptics are abandoning the idea of a future when you'll be able to 3D print just about anything in your living room, and MakerBot, the only relatively well-known maker of 3D printers, has stopped producing its own printers, outsourcing the work to China. Industrial use, rather than personal, ha

Capgemini Consulting's digital transformation business journal looks at the digitization of operations, taking in robotics, 3D printing, and the second machine