Welcome to the course

Welcome to the course!

Additive manufacturing is a rapidly growing field and we are happy to shed some light on how it is used for business growth in this three-week course.

We first acknowledge that additive manufacturing is widely also known as 3D printing. To avoid confusion and to keep to one term, we will consistently use the term additive manufacturing or AM. The relevant terminology standards see the two terms as interchangeable so feel free to use either term in your discussions.

This course is part of the EIT RawMaterials additive manufacturing curriculum. Please see the website of the 3D ACCELERATOR-AMASI project for the other courses. We highly recommend that you have previous knowledge in additive manufacturing before taking this course. If you wish to increase your knowledge, we recommend that you take a look on the other courses from our webpages.

This is the first part of the ExpertTrack course “Additive manufacturing for advanced learners: business opportunities, sustainability and process optimization”. You can study this course separately or as part of the full ExpertTrack course. You will receive a certificate for every completed course and a digital certificate for the ExpertTrack course by taking the final assessment at the end of course 3.

You will get the most out of the course if you participate in the discussions and complete the tasks. We encourage you to interact with other learners and the educators of the course in the discussion sections of the learning steps. Please also check extra readings, they will enrich your experience of material at hand.

Your learning outcomes:

On this course, you will discover how and when AM can be profitably used in industrial applications and how it affects companies’ business models. Taking this course gives you a clear and concise overview of how existing business can be enhanced, and new business created using AM as a supporting technology. You will learn how to apply the business model canvas to a real-life case and practice how to communicate your business ideas to others.

Meet the team:

The lead educator of the team is Professor Jouni Partanen. Professor Partanen is the head of department of mechanical engineering at Aalto University and a professor in the advanced manufacturing and materials (AM2) research group. Professor Partanen has had a long career in additive manufacturing as the Engineering and Advanced Technology Manager in 3D Systems, one of the largest and most prestigious companies in additive manufacturing history.

Joining Jouni is José Luis Grande from Hovering Solutions, the course’s company representative. He will introduce you to the real-life case and will be your mentor for this course. He is a UAV design engineer involved in the complete system development. His background is industrial engineering, focused on electronics and embedded system. His role in Hovering Solutions is related to mechanical, electronical, and thermal designs development using different available technologies (including metallic additive manufacturing) and its integration in a final prototype according to each customer need.

Joining Jouni and José are Jouni’s post-doctoral researcher Sergei Chekurov and doctoral student Kirsi Kukko, who will be with you in the discussions and quizzes.