In recent years, the Forecasting Innovation Pathway approach (FIP) has shown to be a promising set of tools to capture potential developments in emerging fields through capturing indications of endogenous futures. However, the FIP approach is reliant on a clear demarcated area to study, a challenge for emerging technology fields where uncertainty and rhetoric abound. This paper presents an addition to the FIP toolbox that helps characterise and demarcate boundaries of emerging fields to allow for deeper analysis through other FIP methods. We illustrate this approach through an exercise for 3D printing technology (also known as Additive Manufacturing). We show that 3D printing can be represented by a dominant design: a tri-partite configuration of printer, material and digital design software. In the past decade we have seen significant branching from applications in rapid-prototyping to medical, fashion, aeronautics and supply chain management with a variety of elements coming together in tri-partite configurations. The paper adds to the current FTA literature an approach building on evolutionary theories of technical change to help with such situations – emerging, evolving and branching ‘innovation pathways’. Moreover, we developed a methodology to construct these innovation paths.

Introduction

Characterising emerging technology fields is fraught with difficulties. Heterogeneous data, compounded by hype and promise, raises a challenge for future-oriented technology analysis (FTA): how best to approach, systematise and interrogate the data to filter out real evidence on emerging technology trajectories. This is a challenge for relatively clear emerging technologies, but what about those areas which are composed of technology families, perhaps developing at different rates but entangled together? An interesting example of this is additive manufacturing (AM) or 3D Printing. 3D printing uses additive processes for the fabrication of objects in three-dimensions direct from a digital image. The earliest application was rapid-prototyping, around which a community of practice including a number of scientific journals, emerged. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, dedicated conferences, journals and user groups were established to promote the relatively discrete and incremental evolution of additive rapid prototyping. Today, AM is hailed as a revolution and is featured on the cover of publications such as The Economist (“Print me a Stradivarius”, ۲۰۱۱), Wired (Anderson, 2012a) and the MIT Technology Review (LaMonica, 2013). AM is finding a place on factory floors, surgeries1 and in space.2 It is also equipping households as well as FabLabs and hacker spaces of the self-labelled community of “makers” (Bosqué, ۲۰۱۴),۳ in classrooms4 and public libraries. These examples indicate a visible shift in use of the technology from the original application of rapid-prototyping to other areas. What is not so evident is to what extent the different uses additive manufacturing are co-occurring with an evolution and diversification of the additive manufacturing technologies themselves.