Strategic flexibility and networks co-evolution: 3D-printing technology’s accelerator

effect

The paper analyses the network’s alterations caused by the diffusion of a flexible and

innovative technology such as 3-D printing technology in the manufacturing process. This

new network emerged –defined as a beta network- bases its production on the new 3-D

printing technology that works as a trend accelerator in order to provide flexibility to the

network resources, organization and strategies. The strategic process loses its rational

structure and gives room to an emergent approach which finds new allocated resources and

new roles for the actors involved. In the short term the beta-network co-exists with the

incumbent manufactured network, which is defined as having a more vertical structure

organization with fewer actors who have clear relationships and a more linear and structural

strategic approach; while in the long term the two networks can co-evolve in an emerging

integrated network. To investigate these relationship we have used a strategic flexible

(Sanchez, 1993, 1995) and emergent strategy (Mintzberg, 1994) framework in order to

identify a set of propositions. Additionally we used a practice case to facilitate the consistent

of the propositions (Eisenhardt, 1989b).

Introduction

Living with global instability and uncertainty is fast becoming a way of life for organizations to

operate in different industries. While some corporations seem reactively responding and revert back

to fixed strategies, resisting change, using high control whilst basing their strategy on fixed methods

such as competitive and environmental analysis, others seem to be more open to accepting and

embracing the change. These organizations are looking for possibilities and opportunities that may

somehow exist within this chaos and disorder, by seeking to contribute and collaborate towards co-

creating strategies to proactively deal and work with the speed of change and globalization. In this

framework new venture businesses are being established basing their strategy on the culture of

sharing new ideas and innovation and on the abilities to collect more and more collaborations in

order to build the skills and resources needed to fulfill, grow and develop their quest of purpose.

One example of these new ventures’ category is based on internet platforms gathering, collecting

and selling ideas and concepts ‘posted’ by external designers and consumers, use crowdsourcing 1

resources to select the right concept, build up the idea and raise the funds to produce it . Finally the

electronic version of the idea takes shape toward a 3D printer manufacturing process. This new

technology accelerates the dematerialization of the strategy approaching the manufacturing

production as a flexible service delivery. The 3D printer manufacture -incorporated in the strategic

process as a technological capability - allows the organization to produce different, innovative and

customized products, whilst increasing the firm’s ability to respond to the dynamicity of the

competitive environment and exploit new market opportunities. While the 3 D printing enables the

product flexibility, the internet platform model gives to the companies the opportunity to work

selectively with external designers, suppliers, customers and other firms to rapidly compress the

resource management and other important process onto the value chain such as the product

development and the commercialization. This capability to create a different strategy according to

the dynamicity of the environment bases its foundation not only on the capability to identify and

acquire flexible resources (Sanchez, 1995) but also on the capability to coordinate the identified

resources in flexible processes. The objective of this paper is to structure a series of propositions

that analyze the leverage of 3D printing technology on the flexibility and emergence of a new

venture strategy. Moreover these propositions are based on an explorative analysis of Quirki- a new

venture practice case- presented in 2009.

The emergent and flexible strategy: theoretical framework

It is not a new perception or observation that the competitive landscape is changing in many

industries . For example, rapid technological changes, market fragmentations, the convergence of

different industries, shorter product life-cycles, innovations , and so on, have made the environment

more ‘hypercompetitive’ (D’aveni, 1994), truncate (Anderson and Tushman, 1990) and

characterized by ‘high velocity’ (Bougeois and Eisenhardt, 1988) and chaos (DeMarie et al., 1994).

In order to cope with the high level of complexity and uncertainty organizations have developed

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new strategic approaches significantly different from the rudimental low cost, differentiation and

focus archetypes (Lei and Goldhar, 1996).

In the Chandler’s seminal work (1962, 1977) about the technological changes in different

industries, he observed how an impact of the change in technologies can suggest new possibilities

for strategies and for new organizational structures to carry out those strategies.

Strategic flexibility (Sanchez, 1993) has been widely used by strategy researchers to denote firms

abilities to respond to various demands from dynamic competitive environments. A strategic

flexibility shows the ability of the organization to adapt to substantial, uncertain, and fast-occurring

environmental changes that have a meaningful impact on the organization's performance. As

Sanchez underlined, in a dynamic environments a firm can achieve competitive advantage by

managing the uncertainty toward a creation of strategic flexibility in a form of alternative courses of

action or strategic options available to the firms for competing in product markets (Sanchez, 1993,

pp. 254-255).

The strategic flexibility depend jointly on the inherent flexibilities of the resources and capabilities

available to the firms and on the firms flexibilities in applying those resources and capability to

alternative courses of action or, rather, to its organizational structure. As Sanchez noticed (1995)

two are the main indicators of this kind of strategy: the first indicator identifying and acquiring the

use of flexible resources in order to give to a firm strategic options to pursue alternative courses of

actions and respond to the developments in its competitive environment. The second one

developing flexibility in order to coordinate the use of resources to maximize the flexibilities

inherent in the resources available to the firm.

Resource flexibilities can be characterized through a larger range of alternative uses to which a

resource can be applied or can be used effectively to develop, manufacture, distribute or market

different products. In addition, the resource flexibility is greater when costs, time and the difficulty

of switching from one use of a resource to an alternative use are lower (Sanchez, 1995).3

In the context of product competition, coordination involves processes that define the firm's product

strategies in terms of which products the firm intends to offer and which market segments it will

target; the configure chains of resources the firm can use in developing, manufacturing, distributing,

and marketing its intended products to targeted markets; and finally the arrange (i.e. 'resynthesize')

resources through organizational structures that support the firm's product strategies. Analogously,

in dynamic product markets that require frequent adjustments in product strategies, flexibility in

coordinating the uses of product creation resources consists of flexibilities to redefine product

strategies, reconfigure chains of resources, and redeploy resources effectively.

As a result, the strategy process loses its rational and sequential structure and gives room to an

emergent approach which finds a flexible management of the resources and capabilities allocation

and a new role of the organization and actors involved. This process can be considered the result of

tests, repeated experimentations and small steps forward and back: in this sense, the strategy will

emerge from a situation that is not planned. This does not mean that there is no planning but, rather,

that such plans are more flexible and feel their way forward as issues clarify and the environment

changes. The strategic reflection is based on a continuous cycle of analysis, the evaluation of the

available options, decisions, controls and feedback coming from all the stakeholders. A strategy is

no more considered as a frozen plan (Mintzberg, 1994) but a reversible and “semi-coherent” course

of action tending to balance the structure and chaotic situation (Brown and Eisenhardt,1998) .

In this process, technologies and their evolution played a relevant role in affecting the “continuous

morphing” of companies where the strategic orientation and the organization mutually change

(Rindova and Cotha, 2001) dynamically.

Mainly the flexibility and the adaptability of manufacturing technologies such as 3-D printing affect

the way companies change their strategic directions without taking on the costs and the losses

associated with structural changes.

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The technological innovation

As Sanchez (1995) defined, flexibility resources regard also the flexibility of production,

distribution and marketing resources based on a range of product possibilities it can feasibly

develop, including the cost and time to develop each new product. This section examines the way

in which this new manufacturing technology is driving flexibility to human, physical and

information resources used in the creation of products.

3-D Printing Technology

Berman (2012), in a recent contribution, comparing the characteristics and applications of 3-D

printing to mass customization and other manufacturing processes, describes the technology as

employing an ‘additive manufacturing process’ in which products are built on a layer-by-layer

basis. 3-D printers work in a manner similar to traditional laser or inkjet printers, but rather than

using ink 3-D printers use powder that is slowly built into a physical artefact, layer-by-layer. There

are some additional technological aspects to this process:

the integration of the printer with CAD software to achieve a complete design-production

function

the sharing of the product's technical codes via the web, allowing the design to be reproduced in

different places and with different printers

the ability to use different kinds of materials on the same printer (e.g. aluminium, stainless steel,

titanium, polymers, ceramics)

the ability to personalize products on the basis of customers' preferences and make amendments

to the product simply with some adjustments to the CAD program.

Thus, 3-D printing is among a spectrum of technologies being developed to create product parts

and/or the product itself in an easier, more cost efficient and ‘personalized’ way. This product

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change and experimentation (Goldhar and Lei, 1994) is thanks to the technology’s economies of

scope.

The running of a 3-D printer starts from a software technique aimed at helping designers to create

shapes of parts in three dimensions on computer screens and then transfer the instructions for

making them to production machines: such software is being used to make products on this basis in

a range of industries from aerospace engines to jewellery. This Laser scanning system - made by

companies such as the US’s Faro Technologies - can be used to measure the dimensions of items

that need to be replicated or modified. Such items could be anything from products or parts made by

competitors - in so-called ‘reverse engineering’ - to parts of the human body. So the information

about a new item or an old one can then be converted into computer codes and sent to a production

machine for turning into a solid object.

The new technology is changing many aspects of the manufacturing industry adding more

flexibility to the management of the following aspects :

- Flexibility of the human resources relationships: through the link with the connection

between designers and production players. As Abe Reichental (probably the biggest leader

in the sector) a 55-year-old Israeli-American- who is chief executive of 3-D Systems, a US

company that together with Stratasys are the world's two biggest producers of 3-D printing

machines -says the technology can contribute to the ‘democratisation of manufacturing’ by

lowering the barriers between design and production.

‘3-D printing can provide the garage entrepreneur with the same productive capabilities as those of a

large corporation’

he says. The designer will have the chance to do not only the scratch but also the prototype

of the product or, better, the final product. This change will allow the designer to acquire a

part of the value chain belonging to the manufacturing organization.

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- Flexibility of product personalization . A key attribute is that the technology makes it

possible to produce ‘one-off’ or highly personalised parts more easily than other

manufacturing methods. This advantage will have an impact on the reduction of the

relevance of inventory risk and management connected to the opportunity to print on

demand the desired artifacts;

- Flexibility of production through the shortening of cycle time. Jeff Immelt, chief executive

of General Electric1, points out the biggest impact of technology on the ‘shortening cycle

times’ between designing products and making them. This could help manufacturers in the

developed world to compensate for their higher wage costs when compared with those in

more emerging economies such as China. Joe Hogan, chief executive of ABB, the Swiss-

Swedish engineering group, says:

‘3-D printing means it's possible to go from concept to reality (in making one-off parts) in just a few

hours. That's a big help when you are trying to be quicker and more reactive’;

- flexibility in production by decreasing production costs. Hans Langer, chief executive of

Eos, a Munich-based company making 3-D printers, highlights the potentiality of 3-D

printing

‘...make items that are lighter, use materials more economically and behave differently to products made

today. By reducing materials and waste when making single product units 3-D printing could lead to a

completely new way to approach manufacturing’.

Finally 3 D printing technologies are creating new opportunities. Scott Crump, chief executive of

Stratasys, sees 3-D printing as ‘part of a spectrum’ of manufacturing technologies that are creating

new opportunities. These include novel ways to produce the advanced software required to define

shapes of products, together with new versions of more conventional cutting tools. As well as

1 GE is using 3-D printing to make prototype components for testing in its divisions that produce domestic appliances and aerospace engines.

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selling 3-D printing machines, Stratasys also operates factories, including the one in Minneapolis,

which use this technology to make parts for customers. It recently announced a merger with Objet,

an Israeli maker of 3-D printing systems, to create a larger group that will this year have

comparable sales to 3-D Systems- where the figure is expected to be about 340 M$.

Application field of 3 D printing technology

3-D printing is currently used in three different fields: rapid prototyping, specific niche and final

products. Rapid prototyping was the earliest, and still the biggest application for 3-D printing.

3-D printing is used for finished products in specific niches: some industrial components that would

be costly or complex to manufacture are already being 3-D-printed. One exciting area with huge

potential is prosthetics, where 3-D printers allow highly customized prosthetics to be made.

Whilst most 3-D printers are currently used for prototyping and in pre-production mould making

processes, the use of 3-D printing to manufacture end-use parts is also occurring now. This

manufacturing process is becoming known as direct digital manufacturing (DDM). As Fortus

explains, low-volume manufacturing DDM is more cost-effective and simpler than having to pay

and wait for machining or tooling, with on-the-fly design changes and just-in-time inventory being

possible. For example their customer Klock Werks Kustom Cycles has built one-of-a-kind

motorcycles using a Fortus 3-D printer to directly digitally manufacture some of the required

custom parts. Another company using 3-D printing to create final products is Freedom of Creation

(and which was recently acquired by 3-D Systems). Their range of incredible, designer 3-D printed

products includes lighting, furniture, trays, bags and jewellery. Many believe that 3-D printers have

a great future in the creation of fashion items as some artists are now also using DDM to create their

masterpieces. In parallel, this technology appears to be stimulating the founding of new businesses

designing finished products that use 3-D printing and which leverage external creative sources and

crowdsourcing . Nowadays, in order to bring new products, processes and services to the market,

these new businesses mobilise a broad set of skills, which are often beyond their internal 8

capabilities, which do not only include technical skills, but also market analysis, logistics and

behavioural sciences (OECD, 2007). Cooperation with other firms and outsourcing enables 3-D

focused new businesses to use their own internal knowledge resources optimally, to combine them

with specific competencies of their partners, to further specialise and enhance their competitive

advantage (Coffey and Bailly, 1991; Porter, 1990; Abramovsky et al., 2004).

Under this framework, a product emerges from the bringing together of various constituent services

and technical characteristics both material and immaterial (Gallouj and Weinstein, 1997). It can be

considered the output of an integrated knowledge-based value chain (Gallouj and Savona, 2009)

that cuts across industries (Schettkat and Yocarini, 2006). Not surprisingly, along with this process

of knowledge diffusion, the boundaries between manufacturing and services are becoming blurred.

This process of convergence between manufacturing and services may be interpreted as a sign of

the transition of advanced countries from service economies to economies based on service

relationships (De Bandt and Gadrey, 1994). Belong to this new business both virtual marketplace

as I-Materialize and Quirky or real network as FabLab. In the following paragraph we consider the

Quirky case as an example of our consideration, using an explorative research based on the

qualitative analysis

The Quirky practice case

Quirky is a consumer products company that turns crowdsourced invention into retail product via a

manufacturing process based on a 3-D printing technology. Since launching in 2009, Quirky has

rapidly changed the way the world thinks about product development.

The process that, from the idea, arrives at the final product involves a significant plethora of

different types of actors . Each week, dozens of amateurs submit different ideas, from the kitchen

staff to the technological device, up to the jewelry , etc..; then, hundreds of online community

members (or “Quirks”)- composed mainly of hobby inventors, students, retirees and product-design

enthusiasts -weigh in on the products and vote for their favorite submissions. The two most popular 9

ideas are sent to an in-house team of engineers and designers to research, render and prototype.

Kaufman (Quirky’s founder) and his team cull the results, sort out potential patent conflicts or

production problems, then make the final call on the week’s winner. At every stage--design, colors,

naming, logo--the community chimes in. The best suggestions are incorporated, earning secondary

"influencers" a portion of future sales revenue.

Even if a product gets community approval, it will only make it to the market if enough Web

surfers pre-order it to cover production costs. “This is where we find out if a good idea is a good

product,” Kaufman says. “The world doesn’t need more junk.”

In fact, less than a third of Quirky products get made.

Thanks to the community, quirky collects the vast multi-disciplinary skills needed to turn an idea

into something tangible: a design background, electrical engineering, marketing, fund raising and

access to retailers and manufacturers are all required and found in the sourcing community in

order to complete and sell the product . Thus, the community members that participate in many

aspects of product creation, from the design, to naming and coming up with a tagline for a piece

("Protect Your Produce" is the Mercado slogan) will receive a small share of the profits.

The manufacturing process includes a small factory with 3D printers, a laser cutter, milling

machines, a spray-painting booth and other bits of equipment. This prototyping shop is central to

Quirky's business of turning other people's ideas into products: Quirky's product-development team

makes a prototype. Users review this online and contribute towards its final design, packaging and

marketing, and help set a price for it. Quirky then looks for suitable manufacturers. The product is

sold on the Quirky website and, if demand grows, by retail chains. Quirky also handles patents and

standards approvals and gives a 30% share of the revenue from direct sales to the inventors and

others who have helped.

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By using its community as a sounding board, Quirky can quickly establish if there is a market for a

product and set the right price before committing itself to making it. Moreover the speed with which

quirky turn designs into products (thanks to 3D printing technology) “The amount of creativity that

happens when you are standing next to a machine that's making hundreds of thousands of things is

much greater than when you are working 4,000 miles away,” says Mr Kaufman. “Your mind is

spinning as to what else you can design for the machine to make.”

This process has been defined by Kaufman as the “social product development.”

“We bring at least three brand new consumer products to market each week, by enabling a fluid

conversation between a global community and Quirky's expert product design staff”

The world influences Quirky’ s business in real-time, and Quirky shares its revenue directly with

the people who helped them make successful decisions.

Propositions

The new ventures founded on 3-D printing technology are marketplaces for gathering, collecting

and selling ideas and concepts that are ‘posted’ by both external designers and consumers and are

produced by the 3-D printer. Their resources flexibility is inherent with the ability to intercept the

fitting resources combining them with the internalized resources in order to create a range of

products suitable for their customers in a continuum feedback cycle . The resources searching

considers all the process that from the idea, to the concept, prototype, and final product.

Quirky lets users submit their product idea for $10. Users can also vote, rate, and influence other

people’s product ideas started the feedback cycle on the ideas . Every week users can post ideas on

Quirky to be rated by the Quirky community. After a seven day evaluation period, the Quirky

community chooses one product from the pool of submitted ideas to move forward through the

process. Quirky’s community engages and contributes to every part of the product’s development,

weighing in on everything from naming to logo selection to packaging.

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The community’s job is to submit as many ideas and get as much data on the plate as possible, and

help Quirky to sift through things. As Ben Kaufman said

‘Sooner or later, there will be the product from the idea and ..... we put it on the Web site and say:...., Here’s the

product, here’s how much it’s going to cost, but we need to sell X number of these before we actually push it

into manufacturing.’

‘......So, for example, with Jake’s power strip, we needed to sell 960 units before we were able to move into

production. When Jake’s product launched, within a few hours, it was on all the tech blogs, and was being

tweeted and retweeted. Jake was starting to sell several Pivot Powers per minute. He met the production

threshold within a few hours, so we went ahead and moved it into manufacturing.’

Quirky has an internal resource of 8 designers on staff out of a total of 40 people in the firm, and

larger, but indeterminate, number of external designers and community (esteemed around 65,000 )

that bring their capability into the final products. The process below is not linear and built by a

sequential set of activities but comes forward as a chaotic approach, free-wheeling element whose

outcome cannot be planned or predicted in advance by the strategy ,but emerges step by step during

the development of the.

From this framework we are able to define our first proposition:

P1: The crowdsourcing of ideas and concepts induces a continuous and flexible combination

and reorganization of internal resources.

The resource flexibility is also reflecting in the range of different products that the new venture can

effectively create, develop, distributed and sell (Zhou and Wu, 2009).

The intrinsic characteristics of 3-D printing technology enable to produce different categories of

products, in limited quantities and, above all, without a technological complementary relationship

among them. There is an extremely high heterogeneity of produced and sold categories of goods:

from fashion accessories, jewels, to toys, shoes, musical instruments, lamps, interior design

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products. Quirky produces 60 products every year belonging to different industries: Kitchen; Toys;

Home Decor; Lawn & Garden; Electronics; Organization; Fitness; Accessories; Pets.

This product heterogeneity has to be based on a flexible strategy where creating new solutions and

products is more than just sharing technological, esthetical, or category links of products

(Sanderson, and Uzumeri, 1995), it shares a fixed knowledge and common processes and dynamic

capabilities (Chesbrough, 2003). The way that the capabilities and resources of the new venture are

used to generate different and new categories of goods has come to be recognized as an important

contributor to strategy flexibility. The breaking of technological, esthetical and category links can

also reduce the brand power on these productions. Some categories of the products dealt with –

such as accessories, interior design products, jewels – typically linked to brand driven purchasing

processes, in 3-D printing cases they lose the signalling value of the brand and acquire the

signalling power of customization, which is in turn linked to creative processes and communities.

Form this construction we can introduce the following proposition.

P2: The crowdsourcing of ideas and concepts leveraged by 3-D printing new ventures induces

a product-portfolio policy where no product technology complementarities can be achieved

and a flexible balance between volume and margins has to be pursued.

The ability to create a different range of products is sustained by the efforts to synthesize and

subdivide functions and interests and reconfigure existing organizational routines to support the

different product strategy (Sanchez, 1995) via a flexible organization. The product-portfolio

heterogeneity has to be based on a flexible organization able to quickly redefine the resources and

the value chain in relation to the product’s needs . This kind of model is well represented by a

network organization characterized by an increasingly shape a reciprocally interdependent

relationship (Thompson 1967) between designing and manufacturing, as opposed to the

traditionally linear sequential functional separations that usually delineate the two functions (Van de

Ven, 1986; Hitt et al., 1993). In this model the relationship between designers and customers is 13

changing too, requiring a greater and more flexible involvement of customers in the creative and

manufacturing process. The costumer and the designer create the product through a process of

cooperation, feedback, trial and error to achieve high customization products based on the

specificity of the clients .

As a flexible organization model also the distributive channels are flexible: Quirky, for example,

extremely excited about the idea of a creative marketplace community, has developed on-line shops

giving users the chance to buy products generated by various users-designers. Quirky, – mostly in

line with the logic of pushing a distributive strategy – combines a retailing network of products

conceived with their own platform. Actors specialized in organized distribution, such as Safeway,

Target, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Toys “R” Us, are only a few examples of partners where you can

buy products powered by Quirky. These new relationships bring important innovative elements to

the classic models of relationships between manufacturing organizations and distributive channels..

Given these considerations it is possible to draw the third proposition:

P3: The crowdsourcing of ideas and concepts leveraged by 3-D printing new ventures induces

a heterogeneous distribution policy, where different channels and retailers categories are

admitted, due to the continuous flexibility of the product-portfolio composition.

The network organization, the heterogeneity of product portfolio and the flexible strategy are

expanding thanks to the 3D printing technology. The 3D printer involves the new venture inbeing

strategically and structurally more flexible for a list of reasons. the sharing of the product's technical

codes via the web, allowing the design to be reproduced in different places and with different

printers push toward a network structure of laboratories and designers. The ability to use different

kinds of materials on the same printer (e.g. aluminium, stainless steel, titanium, polymers, ceramics)

demands the capability to manage and be connected with different suppliers. Moreover the ability to

personalize products on the basis of customers' preferences and make amendments to the product

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simply with some adjustments to the CAD program, attest the relationship between designer and

costumers .

This new manufacturing technology enables the new venture to achieve greater strategic flexibility

in designing new products, producing high variety of products at low cost. The characteristics of

this technology expand the range of the firm’s potential growth paths reducing the potential barriers

to enter related markets or similar market segments, thus increasing the firm’s strategic flexibility

(DeMeyer et al., 1989, Hayes and Pisano, 1994). Of course the exploitation of this new technology

requires and pushes for a flexible organization design that allows quick responses in order to take

advantage of the capabilities of this technology. From the perspective of strategic management,

increasing economies of scope and greater flexibility mean that firms are not confined to pursuing a

single generic strategy to achieve competitive advantage (Porter 1980) tailored the strategy to

competitor and market profiles.

Emerging Issues and Conclusions

The exploit and development of 3-D printing in modern industrial and manufacturing economies is

promoting new competitive mechanisms supported on an emergent strategy. The flexibility of

resource management and value chain gives rise to a new form of network where the technological

flexibility of 3-D printing technology finds a new way to deal with unpredictable, discontinuous

changes in order to make them more manageable for the organizations. This strategy represents one

type of dynamic capability that enables firms to address discontinuities in the environment

(Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000; Teece et al., 1997). In the current competitive arena, which features

stable and consolidated relationships between large-scale production players, incumbent designers

and design consulting firms (Capaldo, 2007; Dell’Era, Verganti, 2010), there is now a new scenario

that features new players (including newcomer designers and small-scale producers) who base their

competitive advantages on a new open network with a flexible and emergent strategy -a beta-

network - that leverages spreading creativity models. The proliferation of instruments and software

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open to design, the spread of cultures linked to ‘making’ and advanced self-production (Senneth,

2009; Micelli 2011), together with the potential of the 2.0 web and social networks, are the key

factors and the background for the development of these new forms of creativity and

manufacturing.

This latter scenario does not appear, at least currently, to be competing with the current scenario but

to coexists with it. Thus the current scenario -founded on a trading relationship between incumbents

(manufacturers and designers) - has a strategic analysis that begins with the analysis of competitive

environment and the competitive resources of the organization. The objective of the strategy is then

identified and adjusted if the environment or other circumstances change. Finally, it ends up with

rational decisions and rational choices of the options and the most profitable strategy is

implemented thanks to a specific list of activities.

In the new network-defines as a beta network-, the new technology (e.g., 3-D printing) does not

have a central or leading role, but it is a trend accelerator to limber resources and organization

centered on community and design/manufacturing crowdsourcing. The beta-network, an

experiment of sorts that requires the culture of risk, opportunity and change, induces companies to

define a profitable product portfolio based on a wide variety of customized and low-volume

products with no technological complementarities, where the process and community management

prevails over brand management. All the relationships that emerge in this new context often surpass

the traditional vertical relationships between supplier, producers and distributors. Inside this

expanding context, products do not have technological complementarities or branding

relationships. With 3-D printers – given material limitations – companies produce lamps, shoes,

accessories, or toys, without any type of category ties and complementarities.

In the short term, the creation of a beta-network allows to evaluate sustainability and profitability of

a flexible strategy, organization and emerging relationship caused by the resource raising and

amplify by the diffusion of innovation.

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In case of a positive and successful scenario, in the long term we expect the co-evolution with the

existing manufacturing-based network, thus, a redesigning of a new competitive arena: some

incumbent players will be thrown out or reshaped, other new comers will strengthen competitive

advantages acquiring a central role in the new network. This dynamic process of co-evolution

driving the ongoing transformation of competitive environment is a virtuous circle of change based

on increasing flexibilities of new product creation technologies, product strategies and organization

structures (Sanchez, 1995). This co-evolution seems not to be easy if not to the extent that the new

technological capabilities are not sustained by a flexibility and openness of organization and

strategy .

Given its focus on empirical evidence from the diffusion of 3-D printing, our analysis cannot be

employed to identify the specific features of a new emerging industry and its strategic features , but

aims to present some first-hand trends in creativity industries. The propositions suggested in this

paper provide cues for future research studies that aim at developing a deeper understanding of how

the diffusion of a flexible technology innovation could create and successively amplify a flexible

strategy and open network models affecting the management of the resource, the manufacturing

process and the new players and designers role.

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