Beyond prototyping: mapping the relative advantages of adopting additive manufacturing for industrial production
研究了增材制造在低产量工业生产中相对于传统制造的11个相对优势来源，并提出了两个框架帮助管理者理解采用决策的逻辑。
Additive Manufacturing (AM) offers significant potential for product and process transformation due to several Relative Advantages (RA) it holds over Traditional Manufacturing (TM) for low-volume industrial production. However, its adoption levels have fallen short of expectations, due to insufficient understanding on how to leverage combinations of its RAs in different applications and supporting contextual factors. This paper investigates the RAs influencing AM adoption decisions for low-volume industrial production. We qualitatively explored AM adoption decisions of 18 low-volume applications across Aerospace, Automotive, Power Generation, Rail and Marine sectors. We contribute to the AM adoption literature by developing two frameworks. The first framework identifies 11 key sources of RAs which contribute to product performance, process cost and process speed, within a set of four contextual factors, partly explaining the underlying logic guiding adoption decisions. We elaborate on Diffusion of Innovation theory, through specification of the RA construct by enriching it with empirically grounded sub-dimensions and contextual factors for more accurate predictions of managers’ intention to adopt AM. The second framework defines seven types of adoption decisions to explain the RA rationale for adopting AM for industrial end-use components. Our framework offers managers a guide for manufacturing strategy decisions for low-volume components.