There’s surely got to be some amazing business opportunities to be explored alongside the Fab@Home project. Fab@Home is a website dedicated to making and using fabbers – machines that can make almost anything, right on your desktop. The look something like this:

Fabbers (a.k.a 3D Printers or rapid prototyping machines) are a relatively new form of manufacturing that builds 3D objects by carefully depositing materials drop by drop, layer by layer. Slowly but surely, with the right set of materials and a geometric blueprint, you can fabricate complex objects that would normally take special resources, tools and skills if produced using conventional manufacturing techniques.

The goal of the project is to:

Inspired by this history, the goal of this project is to offer an open-source, low-cost, personal SFF system kit, which we call “Fab@Home”. The aim of this project is to put SFF technology into the hands of those same curious, inventive, and entrepreneurial citizens.

Which is fantastic, it opens up so many opportunities to inventors, or businesses and even private individuals looking to prototype new products. I can also imagine how as the fabbers get cheaper, it would be possible for new businesses to spring up selling plans for fabrication on an individual’s fabber – just imagine the impact it could have on the model market alone.

A business could sell model plans rather than kits allowing anyone to setup their own competitor to the likes of Airfix. A business like Lego could move to being a IP company, just sell the plans for the bricks instead of actually making and selling them.

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