3D can help manufacturers across all industries get to market faster, improve their products through quicker testing, and eliminate long deliveries by printing parts on site. Here, we show several ways 3D is advancing across multiple industries, to help spark ideas about what 3D can do for your business. This month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Nike a major patent for technology associated with 3D printing shoes, according to an article in Digital Trends . Nike’s patent calls for a machine to scan the design into a computer, and based on the data, print sewing guidelines on the “strobel,” where the shoe’s upper components are affixed to its midsole. Nike wrote in its patent application that due to improvements in technology, “the number of shoe pieces being added has increased, requiring increasingly complicated manufacturing steps to produce shoes.” However, 3D printing would not completely eliminate the need for human labor for Nike, as the shoe’s upper half still needs to be attached to the midsole strobel, a process Nike admits is “beyond the scope” of the patent. But one day, consumers will be able to buy a shoe design file from Nike and 3D print the shoes themselves, chief operating officer Eric Sprunk told attendees of GeekWire Summit 2015 in Seattle. 3D printing helped Dr. Redmond Burke, director of pediatric cardiovascular surgery at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami, practice before performing heart surgery on five-year-old Mia Gonzalez, Digital Trend wrote. The surgery team needed to repair Gonzalez’s congenital heart defect called a double aortic arch, but could not enter through the left side of her chest as most surgeons do for this particular operation, according to an article in Fortune . MRI imaging showed that Gonzalez’s vascular ring could only been seen, and therefore repaired, by placing […]