The Decentralized and Networked Future of Value Creation: 3D Printing and its Implications for Society, Industry, and Sustainable Development

This book identifies, analyzes and discusses the current trends of digitalized, decentralized, and networked physical value creation by focusing on the particular example of 3D printing. In addition to evaluating 3D printing’s disruptive potentials against a broader economic background, it also addresses the technology’s potential impacts on sustainability and emerging modes of bottom-up and community-based innovation.  Emphasizing these topics from economic, technical, social and environmental perspectives, the book offers a multifaceted overview that scrutinizes the scenario of a fundamental transition: from a centralized to a far more decentralized system of value creation.  

Jan-Peter Ferdinand is a sociologist who currently works at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research and Technische Universität Berlin. His research addresses the nexus of emerging technologies and novel modes of distributed innovation, like e.g. the idiosyncrasies of community-based innovation or entrepreneurial dynamics in open source contexts.

Ulrich Petschow is an economist and is head of the environmental economics and policy unit at the Institute of Ecological and Economic Research in Berlin. His research topics include the governance of new technologies, environmental policy and paths towards sustainable development, with a special focus on new collaborative models of consumption and production. He has participated in the publication of numerous books both as author and editor.

Sascha Dickel is a sociologist and political scientist. As a senior researcher at the Munich Center for Technology in Society (TU Munich, Germany) he investigates techno-social transformations of communication, production, and culture. His current research areas are posthumanism, citizen science, making and engineering. For his PhD thesis on technological utopianism Sascha Dickel received the Philosophical Book Award 2014. Since 2015 he is a member of the working group on additive manufacturing and 3D printing of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.