[MUSIC] Today, I'm in front of Bascom Hall, here at the University of
Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. You may be wondering, what is
an University of Illinois professor doing here at the University of Wisconsin? Well, before I joined
the Illinois faculty, I was a member of the faculty here at
the University of Wisconsin for ten years. As part of my duties, I taught a course
called New Product Development. At the end of this course, students would give presentations
about innovative new products. Well, there was one presentation that
changed my outlook on innovation forever. That was a student presentation
in the fall of 2008, which the students brought forward this
new technology called 3D printing. Like most of the students in the room, I
had never heard of this technology before, and it really fascinated me. So since then, I was determined to learn
all that I could about 3D printing. And about 18 months later,
I purchased my first 3D printing kit. Let me show it to you. This here is the MakerBot Cupcake,
the world's first desktop 3D printer. Now back in 2010,
these machines came as a kit. I'm not an engineer,
I'm a marketing professor. So it was quite a task to build this. This came in a flat box with hundreds
of screws, you can see parts, moving pulleys, gears, and all sorts
of things that I didn't understand. So I sought the help
of a number of people. First of all, I sought the help
of my teenage son, Justin. So Justin and I, in the course of about
two weeks, put this printer together. We got it to turn on, we got their gears
to work, we got the motors to run. But we had a number of problems. First of all, we couldn't get the printer
hot enough to melt the plastic, so we couldn't make the objects. So, I went to New York City to visit
MakerBot to see if they could help. They did. So once we got the plastic to melt,
we had a second problem. The plastic did melt, but
the objects didn't look very good. The edges were rough, they were droopy. It didn't look like
a high-quality piece of work. I realized at that time,
I actually needed an engineer. Fortunately, at the same time, I had
recently read an article about a young engineering graduate from the University
of Wisconsin Madison named Chris Meyer, that established a hacker
space called Sector 67. So I give Chris a call. Supposedly, this place had 3D printers. So I let Chris borrow my printer. He had it for about six months, and by the end of that
time, he got it running very smoothly. Now since that time, I've been interacting
with the hacker space community. There are many of them
all across the country. And they do 3D printing and all sorts
of digital manufacturing that help individuals like me turn
their ideas into objects. So what I'd like to do next is actually
take a walk down to this hacker space, talk to Chris, find out more
about 3D printing, hacker spaces, and the maker movement. [MUSIC] [SOUND]