Abstract/Summary

Additive Manufacturing (AM) offers significant potential for product and process transformation due to a range of Relative Advantages (RA) it holds over rival Traditional Manufacturing (TM) for low-volume industrial production. However, its adoption levels have fallen short of expectations, partly due to insufficient understanding on how to leverage combinations of its RAs in different applications and the contextual factors to support its adoption case. This paper investigates the RAs influencing AM adoption decisions for low-volume industrial production. We employ a qualitative approach to explore AM adoption decisions of 18 low-volume applications across Aerospace, Automotive, Power Generation, Rail and Marine sectors. We contribute to the extant AM adoption literature by developing two frameworks. The first framework identifies 11 key sources of RA which contribute to product performance, process cost and process speed, within a set of four contextual factors, partly explaining the underlying logic guiding adoption decisions. We elaborate DOI theory, through specification of the RA construct by enriching it with empirically grounded sub-dimensions and contextual factors for more accurate predictions of managers’ intention to adopt AM. The second framework defines seven types of adoption decisions to explain the RA rationale for adopting AM for industrial end-use components. Our framework offers managers a guide for manufacturing strategy decisions for low-volume components.