Mobility goes Additive (MgA) is a wholly unique element within the global additive manufacturing (AM) landscape. Across the planet, a new wave of AM-centered consortia are early in their formation processes: companies, academic institutions, and government agencies have begun to recognize that AM can’t grow when its stakeholders go it alone, and that public-private collaboration is a necessary prerequisite, if the industry is to continue evolving.
Meanwhile, MgA, which started as part of Deutsche Bahn’s effort to accelerate AM adoption in the rail industry, is now headed towards its ten-year anniversary. During that time, the organization has grown to include over 140 members that convene in nearly 20 different working groups, with each of the latter dedicated to subject areas that have branched out far beyond the rail industry.
Since its inception in 2016, MgA has expanded under the leadership of Managing Director Stefanie Brickwede, a born networker who is a mainstay of AM industry events internationally. At the recent Additive Manufacturing Strategies (AMS) event in New York City, Brickwede filled me in on MgA’s latest activities, alongside David Hampel, Head of Unit, Manufacturing Industries at Berlin Partner, the economic development corporation of Berlin.
Image courtesy of 3DPrint.com
AMS in fact figured centrally in the latest activities of both MgA and Berlin Partner. As a joint organizing team, the two groups led the AMBER Tech Journey to the US, something of a tech pilgrimage that aimed to fact-find and sow seeds of collaboration between the emerging manufacturing tech ecosystems in the heart of Germany and the US’s Atlantic Seaboard — two of the West’s most important regions economically. AMBER (Additive Manufacturing Berlin-Brandenburg) is the Capital’s ambitious AM Clusrer, driven by the goal to turn Berlin into the “3D printing capital of Europe”.
Given how relevant is the work done by MgA, Berlin Partner, and AMBER to the global AM industry’s most currently pivotal themes, I think that AM stakeholders — especially those in the US — could benefit quite a bit from paying attention to what Brickwede and Hampel are up to:
“Berlin Partner, which is an economic development corporation, follows a strategy called the Berlin Industrial City Master Plan,” began Hampel. “The strategy encompasses a range of topics and technologies that we believe will be increasingly signfificant for the city’s future development. One of these areas of focus is AM.
“A major advantage there is that, when the Berlin Senate passed the latest edition of the Industrial City Master Plan in 2022, Berlin and its surroundings already had one of the world’s most developed clusters of AM companies. So in 2023, when the AM Cluster was given EUR 14 million in project funding under the new AMBER brand, we started from an ideal position to succeed.
“The Berlin senate funded 13 cutting-edge R&D projects under the AMBER roof with more than 30 partners across the region, and we see this as the first step towards building on Berlin’s existing AM strengths to create the nucleus for our vision of the future — the 3D printing capital of Europe by 2030.”
Image courtesy of 3DPrint.com
Even while keeping in mind Berlin’s unique credentials as a hub of AM innovation, the range of topics and applications that AMBER has covered is astonishingly diverse. One project, “AM-SPACE,” focuses on developing “memory plastics” that enable more efficient stowing of in-orbit solar panels. Another, “AVATAR,” works towards the creation of tumor models tailored to specific patients for personalized cancer treatments. The “MultiCarb3DBeton” project is dedicated to formulating carbon fiber-reinforced concrete suitable for lightweight additive construction.
Image courtesy of Berlin Partner and MgA
It is easy to see how AMBER’s successful execution depends on collaboration between Berlin Partner and MgA. There is an obvious parallel between the coherent distribution of AMBER’s R&D funding into 13 separate but interrelated studies, and the way that MgA is organized into its working groups — some of which are rather self-contained, but most of which have extensive overlaps:
“Typically how we start the process of forming a new working group is we’ll simply have some members who say, we should dive a bit more deeply into a particular new subject,” explained Brickwede. “That is happening at the moment, for instance, with the lifestyle industry, which you can’t find listed on our website yet because it’s so new. We’re also starting a working group on public transport, in general. I think that’s an especially interesting topic because, even though every area of public transport has its own challenges, they all share many similarities, giving us an ideal opportunity to apply what we’ve learned from rail.
“Tramways and subways have just as much potential for AM adoption as trains. That also provides organic potential to work with organizations in addition to Deutsche Bahn, and with agencies outside of Germany. We are working with public transport companies from areas like Vienna, for instance, and in March we’ll be talking to France’s RATP, the public transport company of Paris and its surrounding areas.
“So, while we don’t always have crossover effects between our different working groups — you won’t have many commonalities between lifestyle and public transport — everything we do shares the top-down similarity of having to figure out how to adapt new technological processes to existing industrial standards. When we work with a group like the Berlin public transport company, then, we already have quite a head start at this point in helping them determine how they need to get started. They’ve been very interested in what we’ve accomplished. And our shared AM ambition with Berlin Partner is invaluable in enabling that working relationship to be so productive right from the beginning.”
Image courtesy of Berlin Partner and MgA
The funding for the AMBER projects runs through the end of 2025, and while €14 million gets the ball rolling, the natural question that came to my mind was, where do things go from there?
“We were certainly in a fortunate situation three years ago when the funding was approved,” said Hampel, “and it’s not a guarantee that the government is going to be able to spend the same amount of money every three years. AI, for example, is just as big of a topic in Berlin as it is everywhere else in the world right now. But I think that when the government is able to review the success of the final results, it will provide the foundation for a good argument that this project is worth continuing into the next phase. This is a great starting point, and I think we’re in exactly the position we want to be in, in order to achieve our goal of making Berlin the number one address for AM in Europe.”
If there’s one thing that Brickwede knows how to do, it’s bring the right people and organizations together in order to maximize positive momentum. To me, the most impressive thing about MgA has always been that it has convinced as notoriously conservative, necessarily stringent industry as rail to get to — and stay at — the cutting edge of manufacturing technology. Perhaps even more impressively, though, is that Brickwede sees precisely how to apply all that MgA has learned to every other sphere of the AM industry:
“AM is always a change management program,” Brickwede told me. “And a change management process requires a lot of persuasion: you need to form consensus, you have to convince people, and that’s a lot of talking and networking. But the good thing is, now it’s easier than ever to find people in every organization who are enthusiastic about AM, and that’s something that we’ve capitalized on at Deutsche Bahn and MgA.“
MgA and Berlin Partner have set a precedent not just with Deutsche Bahn, and not just with 13 projects that are a part of AMBER, but a precedent for the possibilities of organizing across entire industries to achieve systematic, continuous innovation. If the new wave of AM consortia the world over follows their lead, AM’s reality could live up to its expectations, sooner rather than later.
Featured image courtesy of Berlin Partner and MgA
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