Before the Industrial Revolution, goods were produced by local artisans and craftsmen relying primarily on locally available materials and selling primarily to local customers. These artisans conceived of and then made products, and they sold these products in their own small shops or out of their homes. In this environment, the customer was directly linked to the producer; there was no middleman and no supply chain. The Industrial Revolution ushered in an era of innovation in production methods, mining methods, and machine tools that enabled mass production and allowed the replacement of labor with machines and of traditional energy sources such as wind, water, and wood with coalpowered (and later gas-powered) machines. In the past 200 years, the elements of production have been refi ned, but the underlying economics have remained: competitive advantage goes to the company or companies (organized into a supply chain) that can produce the highest quality part at the lowest cost. Fixed costs—infrastructure and machinery—became separate from variable costs—those expenditures that increased on a per-unit production basis, such as labor and materials. Economies-of-scale production models meant that high-volume production reduced the contribution of the fi xed-cost portion of the cost equation, thus reducing the per-unit cost. Simply put, high throughput and effi ciency yielded higher profi ts ( Pine 1993 ). Today we are entering an era many believe will be as disruptive to the manufacturing sector as the Industrial Revolution was—the age of 3D printing and the digital tools that support it ( Koten 2013 ). At a EuroMold fair in November 2012, 3D Systems used one of its 3D printers to print a hammer. The Economist (2012) used this example to compare the traditional supply chain design-build-deliver model with the emerging 3D printing model: