Creative conversations 3D Printing: Boon for Global Innovation or the ‘Napster Moment’ for the Manufacturing Industry? The development of 3D printing has already brought us to the cusp of a manufacturing revolution with a profound but as yet uncertain impact on daily life. The prototyping era beginning now is empowering the end user, enabling us to personalize, to tweak design parameters, and potentially to copy any object from a mobile phone cover to a tennis shoe. How does the process actually work and what materials are currently being used? What are the wider implications for the manufacturing industry, and for issues of ownership and intellectual property versus open sourced shared knowledge? To what extent can we draw parallels to the music industry and content community, struggling to control distribution and move to access models? 3D printing is here to stay: the critical question is how we embrace this revolution. 26 InnovationSpace: The Lab