The University of Notre Dame’s IDEA Center is a center for entrepreneurial activity that brings new innovations to market. Within the IDEA Center is the Innovation Lab, which gives the university’s budding entrepreneurs the tools to turn ideas into products, and products into new businesses. Matthew Leevy serves as the Innovation Lab’s director and views 3D printing as an essential element for incubating concepts into new startups.
Supporting students with professional-grade tools.
The Innovation Lab’s role isn’t to teach students how to 3D print – rather, its 3D printers provide the means to bring their ideas to life. They need to work reliably, as any dependable tool should. To get that kind of performance, the Lab purchased professional F120™ and F370™ 3D printers from Stratasys, which have sufficiently met the needs of Leevy and his staff. “The whole F Series printers are just workhorses,” says Leevy. “They work so reliably.”
For Leevy, justifying the price difference between professional printers and lower-priced consumer grade machines is easy because he knows the added costs associated with troubleshooting less-capable printers. “Reliability means less staff input. If you have to spend two hours a week troubleshooting a machine, that’s 100 hours per year. If that time is worth $50 per hour that could be spent on billable or other projects, that’s $5000. So over the course of one year, the machine has paid for itself,” says Leevy. “Staff time is money, so if I have a staff member that spends an entire day with tech support trying to fix machines that consistently don’t work, it’s a real drain on resources. It’s just not worth it – life is too short,” he adds.
Going big with the F770.
While the small to mid-sized printers do a good job handling most of the demand, Leevy admits that the F770 is somewhat of a game-changer. As an example of its versatility, Leevy relates the story of a student who needed to produce 150 skateboard parts to support a small business venture. That’s where the F770 provided the key. “We just set it up for a weekend run and made 150 parts,” says Leevy. “You don’t have to do three or more changeouts on another machine. You just run it, come back in a couple of days and the parts are done.”
The F770 also has also alleviated another problem – having to section large parts. Previously, students had to spend extra design time to determine the best way to break large parts into multiple pieces that could be mechanically fastened together. Not only does this demand more time, it doesn’t necessarily result in an optimal design.
The University of Notre Dame’s IDEA Center mission is, in Leevy’s words, “to unlock discovery, fuel genius and advance the common good.” The right 3D printers help the IDEA Center’s Innovation Lab focus on achieving that goal, without the distraction and wasted resources associated with less capable printers. And since the IDEA Center helped launch 30 new startup businesses in 2020, a year that saw many businesses close due to a global pandemic, it’s clear that the “idea” is working.
To learn more, download the full case study on Stratasys’ website here.
