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Public and private goods in the development of additive manufacturing capacity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2017

Steven Samford ,
Peter Warrian  and
Elena Goracinova
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Abstract

The promotion of additive manufacturing (AM) as a set of enabling technologies has been a prominent feature of new policies seeking to revitalize manufacturing in developed economies. Because of its differences from traditional manufacturing technologies, small businesses, in particular, face high costs in adopting AM methods. How can governments assist small firms and their innovation ecosystems to make significant leaps in enabling technologies? This paper conceptualizes the challenges faced by groups of small enterprises adopting new technologies and a decentralized policy effort to systematically increase the use of advanced manufacturing technologies. In Canada, funding used by community colleges to create applied research centers has been intended to establish anchors for local “industrial commons” around advanced manufacturing methods. By providing both information and working capital to private sector partners, these community college programs should ideally mitigate challenges to the adoption of AM technologies—the so-called “valley of death”—in local ecosystems. There are many successful individual cases of partnership (i.e., private goods); however, this bottom-up approach seems to fail both as a means of promoting vibrant industrial commons (i.e., public goods) and as a coherent national strategy. We trace the challenges of this approach to principal-agent problems associated with layering new programs upon existing organizations, the density of program participants, and the presence of appropriate technologies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business and Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 482 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © V.K. Aggarwal 2017 and published under exclusive license to Cambridge University Press 

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Footnotes

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to David Wolfe, Dan Breznitz, and Robert Luke for helpful comments on the project, to participants in the Innovation Policy Lab working group at the University of Toronto, and to the interview subjects for their willingness to take part in the study. Financial support for this research was provided by SSHRC Partnership Grant No. 895-2013-1008.

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