Member Reviews

THE PAN-INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION by Richard D’Aveni is subtitled "How New Manufacturing Titans Will Transform the World." D'Aveni is a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and he makes a thorough examination of the history (beginning with early 1980s experiments) and growth of 3D Printing, now called additive manufacturing (AM). Building on his extremely popular Harvard Business Review article on this topic, D'Aveni explores subtopics like machine wars, platform wars, and branding strategies for AM. While a key part of his audience will be manufacturers and business managers who are interested in this industry, our Business students will find aspects of this text and its future orientation to be valuable, too. For example, I can readily see a teacher assigning Chapter 12 ("The Path to Tomorrow") which provides useful overview of the four phases of adoption for this technology. He contends that much of AM currently lies in the "early adoption" phase and is very positive about growth through mainstream and ubiquitous adoption with diagrams interspersed throughout the text. D'Aveni also provides several pages of sources and a helpful index. Kirkus gave THE PAN-INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION a starred review and called it "essential business reading."

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