There is a moment in most product development cycles when the pace of thinking outruns the pace of making. A designer has an idea on Tuesday. The revised part won’t arrive from the bureau until Friday. By then the meeting has happened, and the iteration that might have changed something arrives too late to matter.

It is a small dysfunction, but it is everywhere. And it points to a deeper problem that the manufacturing industry has been slow to confront: that the tools capable of producing serious, functional parts have never really been designed to live where ideas are made.

Having marked a decade of technological progress, HP Additive Manufacturing Solutions is making a deliberate bet that this changes, and its latest announcements show how.

Bringing the Print Floor In-House

For most product teams, industrial-grade additive manufacturing has always lived one step removed from where they actually work.…