Creativity needed to deliver Additive Manufacturing’s £5bn dream

That is the view of Kieron Salter, Managing Director of KWSP, the high performance engineering consultancy that contributed to the report entitled Additive Manufacturing UK (September 2016).

While Salter believes the document represents an important step forward for the UK’s growing AM sector, it also highlights areas of structural weakness within the wider industry that need urgent attention. He said: “The AM steering group has done a great job of creating a vision for the nascent sector, while agreeing a clear five-point plan to achieve its £5bn aspiration within the next decade.

“However, as a dynamic SME working in the area of high value manufacturing, our single biggest challenge is the lack of engineering graduates with a broad appreciation of emerging technologies, coupled with the creativity to apply them in novel ways. This is a key challenge for UK manufacturing that should be on the agenda for universities and industry.

“It goes further back than this. Schoolchildren are not sufficiently exposed to, or assessed on, their creative thinking or problem solving skills and they should be. At school and in further education, we continue to take a silo mentality, where sciences and the arts rarely meet. Advancements in additive manufacturing mean that engineers can now take much more inspiration from nature, and we need to get this message across to boys and girls in their formative years. Indeed, the focus on STEM subjects is not a bad thing, but there is a groundswell of opinion within industry that we need students to cover STEAM topics – science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics.

“What we need are well rounded young engineers who are exposed to the benefits and features of future technologies, so they can be creative and exploit these areas within the workplace. Every year new tools, new technologies, new materials and new processes are being invented and developed, but they are being exploited by engineers who already have excellent science engineering and creative skills.

“Having a rich flow of informed graduate engineers who already have an understanding of the practical application of AM would provide the UK with an immediate competitive advantage over countries such as Germany, America and Japan, who are all already investing heavily in their knowledge base.”

Salter believes that a greater appreciation of the power of creative thinking from schools, universities, industry and policy makers would make a significant improvement in the UK’s global standing as a centre for additive manufacturing.