DIGITAL DISRUPTION & INNOVATIVE OPERATIONS: IMPLICATIONS OF 3D PRINTING BUSINESS MODELS AND MAKER MOVEMENT

3D printing technology plays a big part in the ongoing digital disruption, and it can change the way products are designed, produced and delivered. However, in a McKinsey survey of leading manufacturers, 40% of the respondents were ill-prepared to identify its business opportunities. In my dissertation, we bridge this gap by rigorously studying and providing managerial insights about new business models that utilize 3D printing. In the first two essays, we study the business model of personal fabrication (PF) where the firm sells product's design to the customers and lets them personalize and manufacture the product using 3D printing services. The first essay focuses on quality customization enabled by personal fabrication in a competitive setting. In the second essay, we generalize our model and study how PF enables customization in both quality and taste dimensions. We contribute a novel two-dimensional modeling framework to study personalization. Our results characterize the attractiveness of PF strategy based on the market structure, price vs quality consciousness of the customer base, demand uncertainty and IP/liability restrictions of the product. In the third essay, we study the effectiveness of in-store 3D printing for product customization under different channel structures (centralized vs decentralized), markets (niche vs saturated), and competitive conditions. 3D printing is also fueling the maker movement and open innovation by enabling cost-effective prototyping and design sharing. In the fourth essay of my dissertation, we study a large unstructured data set of 3D product designs scraped from a famous maker movement platform (thingiverse.com). We study how design innovations diffuse and interact with innovator learning and manufacturability.Doctor of Philosoph