Since May 2015, in a portion of its WorldPort distribution center in Louisville, Kentucky, United Parcel Service has been operating a spare parts warehouse with no spare parts. Instead, the facility is stocked with ultrafast 3-D printers that can build up almost any plastic part that’s required, layer by layer by layer — and have it ready for UPS...

Dean Kamen founded the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute ( ARMI) to mass produce human organs. The goal is to jumpstart a new industry of biofabrication in the U.S. Nearly 120,000 Americans are waiting for a donated organ, and 20 of them die each day waiting for a transplant. Dean Kamen has raised about $300 million, $80 million from...

The Digital Manufacturing Design and Innovation Institute (DMDII) announced on March 12 that it has launched a Cyber Hub for Manufacturing. It is part of DMDII’s public-private partnership as one of the Manufacturing USA institutes which are sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to advance the state-of-the-art in digital manufacturing...

The SXSW 2018 program says ARMI/BioFabUSA Executive Director Dean Kamen holds more than 450 patents, and that is technically true. But that number is almost 10 years old; Kamen's name now appears on well over 1,000 patents.

And these patents are for real things that impact the lives of real people: the world's first drug infusion pump; the...

It's become conventional wisdom that the last 30 years have been a hotbed of innovation, but evidence suggests otherwise. As Robert Gordon explains in The Rise and Fall of American Growth, productivity growth peaked between 1920 and 1970 and has declined ever since. Economist Tyler Cowen calls this the Great Stagnation.

Part of the reason for the...