The paths to success in additive may appear limited, but this is only because of so much strategic replication and so many copycat businesses.One potentially lucrative path to additive success can be had in doing something that seems unoriginal. You can, for example, revamp a business that others consider “done” — and do it better.Fast followers get short shrift in a lot of the press articles about innovation and building businesses.
But, some people consider Google, Microsoft, Apple and Meta to be examples of fast follower businesses.Maybe it’s time, therefore, to be unoriginal, like some of the biggest companies on earth? Fast Following The NOMAD Series deployed on site.Image courtesy of Fieldmade.
A fast follower business knows that there is a market somewhere with customers who are paying for a product.They skip the whole trial and error phase and just look at concrete actions of existing players and where they can be bested.Through this focus, they can mold their purpose, organization, and cost structure to the exact market opportunity at hand.
Their product, differentiation, and plan are much clearer to them and their organizations, but also to the market in general.If you’re the first supermarket, you kind of bumble along and discover things.This is expensive in time and money.
It also creates a lot of vestigial structures in your organization and product offering.You offer plastic flowers because you began with them years ago, you have a lot of pet food because you began as a pet food store a decade ago, you have a lot of laidback people around who are not really a fit for the lean, aggressive organization that you’ve become, you still have cash registers because you still have cash registers, etc.A lot of businesses fail because they do business as usual.
Lack of change or an unwillingness to confront vestigial structures is, in my opinion, a reason for a lot of business failures.Now, imagine we’re a New Supermarket competing with the plastic flower and pet food heavy supermarket mentioned earlier.We’re going to see if we can do without cash registers, if it makes sense, or if maybe we can have a Cook Bar where people can come to for advice and contact while expediting automated checkout.
We’re going to figure out if plastic flowers make money because we want to out-compete in them.We’re going to look for data on whether pet food engenders loyalty and habit.Failing businesses often sleepwalk, and successful, growing ones are curious, agile, and finding out the why and how of things.
Counterintuitively, we can see the innovator sometimes run on instinct, while the follower is engaged with rethinking how the business works.The innovator wanders, while the follower is looking for handholds and why they are shaped in a certain way.Copying Mistakes Now, this is not always the case.
Once, during our time at an innovative firm, we were surprised to find that the competition was copying an obvious design flaw.It turned out that we didn’t know from where we were deriving our advantage.We were unaware of where they knew little and understood less.
It’s not always easier being a fast follower.Whereas in car rental, you can find out most all of the business from being a customer and working for them a while, but you may have no idea how, and in what conditions, the cars are obtained.Now, this is an obvious thing to want to know in car rental, and you’d strive to find it out.
But in many other cases, there are key things that you do not realize the importance of.Unique Challenges Given that proviso, a fast follower business could be a tempting one in additive now.A lot of these have been attempted, most notably in chairside dental, medium-format Material Extrusion machines, wannabe Materialise firms, LPBF quality assurance software, premium filament firms, value LPBF machines, LPBF powder, and more.
Notably, many of these followers in additive have failed.The main reason for them failing is people not paying attention to the advantages of fast following generally.Just because one company can get paid, it doesn’t mean that there is room for growing competition, or even much of a market out there at all.
In many of the above examples, there simply was not a market (yet).Furthermore, there was just not enough revenue to grow a lot of these businesses, or justify anything like the runway they would need to get to scale and/or profitability.Make sure that you actually have a market sounds like a patronizing thing to say, but many companies in fact didn’t.
What targets? If the obvious candidates won’t suffice, then what is a candidate for a fast follower business? Fieldmade is an excellent company that enables energy and defense businesses to do austere manufacturing.Through making containers, standards, online platforms, and key tooling, the company lets you 3D print on board an oil platform, at a remote refugee camp, or in the Arctic.The company has close working relationships with clients and builds great products for them.
From a digital file sharing platform for energy companies, its Fieldnode spin-out, or a part repair capture tool, Fieldmade is making tools that others should but don’t.It’s making the key infrastructure and sinews of future MRO, austere, and remote manufacturing.It also makes standard or highly custom containers for clients in shipbuilding, oil, and defense.
This is a simply wonderful business because the company can enable and partner with many OEMs and material firms to enable their functioning in locations and on parts that they normally could not make.Meanwhile, not a single company can do what Fieldmade is, and no one competes with them.There are many more cases out there where truly fantastic businesses and business cases are simply unopposed, while everyone just targets the same five applications and the same 100 customers.
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