Additive Manufacturing as a Digital Design Technology in the Wood-Furniture Sector: Benefits and Barriers to Its Implementation

The research analyzes the potential sustainable benefits and barriers to the implementation of Additive Manufacturing in the wood-furniture industry, trying to identify the gaps in perception between “traditional” and “3D companies”, and also to predict which are the main factors that could lead companies to its implementation. It has been administered a questionnaire in 2017, on a sample of 2035 Italian companies in the wood-furniture industry, using simple random sampling, obtaining 234 participants. The Analysis of Variance and binary regression were used to evaluate data collected. The research highlighted how Italian 3D companies are interested for new products and product features showing a propensity to innovation and putting design and made in Italy in the first place. The results underline that the main advantages of using 3D printing are the reduction in time to define technical specifications of products, in time for prototyping and production. For the successful implementation of AM technologies, the decision to adopt them has to be accompanied by a change in jobs and tasks, and thus a change in work practices and structure. The experimental techniques used is the added value of this study: no previous quantitative analysis has been realized on a large sample of furniture companies.