How can you beat Garry Kasparov? With a baseball bat.If you ask yourself the question, “How can I beat Garry Kasparov,” and silently add the fragment “at chess” in your mind, you’d pretty much always lose.You could study all the chess books and take years, but he’d shunt you aside with little effort.
Now, if your name is Magnus Carlsen, you might think, “I almost beat him when I was 13.” Later, you hired him as your coach for a while.Based on that, Magnus would probably have a good idea of how to beat Kasparov at chess.But you are not Magnus Carlsen.
The rest of us would have no idea where to even begin.But if I asked you, “How can you guarantee beating Kasparov?” the only correct answer to me is: with a baseball bat (or something to that effect).I’d never even pick up a chess book.
Why? You asked me to beat him, not win at chess in a match against him.Now that example seems silly.But in the business world, people every day puff themselves up and prepare for battles they should never have joined.
Full of fervor, hope, and newfound knowledge, the lamb steps up to the chopping block.A strategy is specific to you, and if you don’t know what you’re willing to lose, you’ll never win.What will you sacrifice? What will you risk? To what end? Also, if a strategy or mission isn’t tailored to you, it likely won’t work—or at least not well.
If your assumptions about who you are, what you can do, and what you actually do are incorrect, failure is inevitable.So let’s boil things down to their true essence and think of Prusa not as what it is, but what it needs to be.Prusa Research is, therefore, in my mind, a group of motivated open-source hardware developers that lean toward quality and vertical integration.
If we look at Prusa, we can assume the end goal is to have a number of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed people making open-source things well, in Prague, at a profit, for a community.That, to me, is a reasonable place to start.Specifically, the goal should not be to make a better 3D printer than a Bambu, beat Bambu, or sell more printers, or to sell X amount of printers.
These aren’t goals—they’re, at best, milestones set by a rather arbitrary and situational idea of defining success right now.Worse still, in defining the problem in this way, we miss thinking about what it is we really want, need, and can do.Even worse than this, we can actually hasten our own doom if we focus incorrectly.
Given those assumptions, I’d undertake the following joint paths if I were Josef.Market to the Installed Base With hundreds of thousands of Prusa printers and millions of Prusa-derived printers out there, I’d pay much more attention to the installed base.Selling gold standard build platforms, updated extruders, mixing nozzles for silicone, syringe nozzles in general, kits for laser cutting, kits for injection molding, extra toolheads, and more—this is, to me, a potentially large market with high margins.
You could do a kind of Kickstarter project where you present the open-source development in full, then ask people to pay for the tool in advance and produce the requisite number of products.This can be repeated often at low risk, and some products could be very successful indeed.It’s not a huge “save the ship” activity, but it can wring extra profit from the community while giving them a whole host of tools that will improve the usefulness of their 3D printers.
Meanwhile, all the products would be open source, and plans would be available at no cost to those who don’t want to pay.This aligns with the ethos of the firm, and in addition to generating revenue, it would also let the company discover unexpected successes and new products worth devoting more time to.This path leverages the company’s strength in open engineering and builds on a lot of the work it’s already doing in upgrades, spare parts, and other kits.
Make an Inexpensive Open Source Bioprinter Freeform Reversible Embedding of Suspended Hydrogels (FRESH) 3-D bioprinting technique, which allows for the printing of soft gels.Image courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University.I’ve actually suggested this one a few times to Prusa people and think it could be super valuable.
In 2019, the NOSE extruder was released, which took a Prusa i3 and turned it into a bioprinter.Similar developments include the release of FRESH as a technology and the resulting company, FluidForm.Another variant is SLAM.
All these technologies use a syringe-type nozzle and a regular 3D printer to extrude material into a bath of hydrogel (or another medium).Rapid Liquid Print has shown how a similar process can be used to make flexible materials.With a $1,000 to $5,000 FRESH-, NOSE-, or SLAM-derived bioprinter, bioprinting as a technology could be significantly advanced.
High schools, colleges, and developing countries could afford such systems and develop relevant bioprinting expertise.They could even help advance the technology as a whole.What’s more, these devices could serve as experiment replication machines, making it easy—through Printables and settings sharing—to replicate scientific experiments.
One of the biggest problems in science today is the lack of replication of results (lots of pioneers, no mapmakers).If we could have tens of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of bioprinters worldwide collectively printing new structures and testing new formulations and designs, we’d effectively be developing a collective scientific discovery mechanism that’s remarkably efficient and broad.This could actually advance regenerative medicine and other areas significantly.
At the same time, it could be highly relevant for drug firms, hospitals, universities, and researchers.Just like Prusa democratized 3D printing, the firm could democratize bioprinting.It would align with the company’s existing skills, people, and ethos, and everything would be completely familiar to them.
The financial opportunity is potentially enormous as well.Additionally, that 3D printer could also print a wide array of new materials, opening experimentation up to circuits, pastes, food, soft robotics, and more.Combining it with the hydrogel bath setup would then enable new printing methods for many elastomeric materials.
Such a development would therefore advance both the bioprinting and 3D printing communities and allow for many sales to the regular 3D printing crowd as well.Develop a Factory in a Box Prusa has extensive experience in print farms, using them heavily in-house.In the farming world, it is competing against Creality and Bambu machines to enable low-cost, scalable profits.
3D print farming is growing rapidly, with individual farms running anywhere from 50 to 800 systems.At the same time, corporates are increasingly exploring print farm solutions for spare parts and prototyping, while colleges are turning to managed print platforms.Specific applications are also emerging, such as Nanoe Zetamix dielectric filament for RF components and desktop ceramic systems being used for end-use parts.
Militaries, aid agencies, and energy companies are evaluating 3D printing in austere environments, and adoption in the developing world could be significantly accelerated if implementation were simpler.Given Prusa’s experience, it should establish a comprehensive suite of training, maintenance, and operational courses and guides for various scales, building on its existing training offerings.It should then develop a deployable series of printers with automated part removal.
Next, it should offer enclosures to improve repeatability.Following that, it should create a grinding and extrusion line capable of producing filament from granulate or recycling PET bottles into filament.It should also develop a compounding line, enabling users to create their own materials.
Tip from me: the key to recycling PET bottles is to use only one bottle type from a single vendor to ensure consistency in melt flow index and other properties.Everyone always tries to recycle mixed-brand bottles, and it’s just a mess.In combination with a filament line, the Prusa solution would offer better economics and be highly sustainable.
For universities or militaries—both of which consume billions of water bottles—this would be a compelling proposition.Reliability and service would also be crucial in these contexts, and not being a Chinese company would be an additional advantage in some regions.Prusa could then establish a manufacturing and service network, taking a small fee for passing print jobs to Print Farm customers.
This would function similarly to what 3D Hubs or Shapeways once aimed for but would enable global, low-cost part production through Prusa’s partners.The company could then offer spare parts management software, white-labeled Printables, and digital warehouse solutions.Warning to the wise here: if the imagined end goal is a software platform solution and too much emphasis is placed on that outcome, failure may arise.
That kind of move would mirror NEC and Fujitsu’s meandering attempts to find technology futures for themselves.Instead, let’s shift to a mega-trend-adjacent direction and acquire assets in areas likely to be disrupted.This is less risky than the big-bet strategies taken by companies like Toshiba or Bayer, which rarely succeed.
It’s better to approach the future by asking: who else can I enable parts manufacturing for with my current capabilities? That’s a far more likely and surefooted path forward.Open Source All The Things 3D Printed Lab Equipment by OpenLab In conjunction with a factory-in-a-box strategy, Prusa could also expand its offering of open-source products.It could develop open-source lab equipment, tools, hardware, production tooling, medical equipment, and products specifically designed for use in austere environments.
The company could promote the development of these open-source items, making them freely available for download.At the same time, Prusa could sell these products with the necessary guarantees and certifications globally.This market is far larger than the current 3D printing market, and even limited success in one area could drive significant revenue growth, leveraging Prusa’s existing foundation.
It would align perfectly with the spirit of the firm and help advance technology for all.Also, I don’t see anyone else being able to pull this off.People would likely be mistrustful of a large corporation, a startup, or even another 3D printing company attempting something similar.
Uniquely, Prusa could make this happen.The Desktop CNC Revolution 3D printing has had quite a ride, but the CNC market is much bigger.Laser cutting also presents a huge opportunity, as do water jetting, injection molding, blow molding, plastics recycling, plastic filament extrusion, vacuum forming, routing, lathes, pick-and-place machines, paint machines, milling, and more.
Many of these tools already exist in desktop, open-source, or inexpensive forms, as we’ve discussed before.Taking these devices and value-engineering them into reliable, open-source tools that work for years is exactly what Prusa excels at.The company can leverage its talents, workforce, and community to expand beyond 3D printing into all forms of desktop manufacturing tools.
This is, to me, the most blindingly obvious way forward—and I struggle to understand why no one has truly attempted it.Other companies outside of 3D printing have generally had poor success in developing these tools well.In Conclusion I think that in a head-on “specification against specification” battle with Bambu, Prusa will lose.
Bambu is focused on the right, bigger market, and such a battle would play to Bambu’s strengths while failing to leverage Prusa’s own.With a company trained on makers, a pivot to consumers would also be countercultural and unlikely to result in truly consumer-ready devices.Instead, I believe Prusa should play to its strengths as an open-source hardware and software development firm.
It should market products to its installed base, develop an open-source bioprinter, create a factory-in-a-box solution, and expand into desktop manufacturing tools for CNC and related applications.Rather than focus on just one of these things, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest the firm pursue all of them at once.This might seem like sheer folly, but in reality, each of these moves reinforces the others.
The same software infrastructure needed for CNC, 2D, spare parts warehousing, new toolpathing, and liquid deposition would support and accelerate the success of each initiative.Someone else could develop a factory-in-a-box, but Prusa could make one suited for two-component syringe extrusion of silicone.That development could begin as an add-on sold to the existing installed base, then evolve into an option on new printers, and eventually scale into print farm deployments.
A comprehensive software solution would benefit Prusa broadly—enabling better part selling for print farms, making farm ownership more attractive, and supporting new services built on top.Better software, better print farms, and low-cost recycled filament would strengthen print farm economics, while also supporting the viability and performance of diverse toolheads.A flywheel in this case would therefore be that a better Prusa X printer (and past printers) serves as a stable platform for toolhead sales, generating new paths forward for clients and the firm, as well as profit.
These toolheads will be integrated into customer print farms—farms designed to sell goods or offer unique capabilities—unlocking new applications.Coupled with extrusion lines, these systems will enable unique capabilities at unprecedented costs.That volume, in turn, will improve Prusa X, enhance the reliability and cost-efficiency of new platforms and toolheads, and grow both the farm business and single-unit sales.
Revenue from expanded sales will fund the development of specialized derivative systems—standalone bioprinters, CNC machines, lathes, and more—that reuse software and many parts.These will also drive new toolhead sales, further reinforcing and expanding the software infrastructure and fueling growth in toolhead ecosystems overall.Meanwhile, part sales will leverage this hardware/software flywheel, proving the utility of such components and expanding the “makable,” thereby driving new demand for systems.
And that is how I think Prusa can 3D print a new future for itself—one that is much brighter, far more lucrative, and significantly more valuable to humanity.Subscribe to Our Email Newsletter Stay up-to-date on all the latest news from the 3D printing industry and receive information and offers from third party vendors.Print Services Upload your 3D Models and get them printed quickly and efficiently.
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