Yakov Hornstein wrote:
At 9:33 AM -0500 10/3/98, harrjp@juno.com wrote:
>I am only concerned with the Universities that are operating as
Service
>Bureaus. They purchase equipment and material at half the
price. Who
>can compete with that!
Indeed! Here in Italy we experience this a lot. Quite a number
of places
receive subsidies of one kind or another and use these to
sustain cut-rate
prices on RP services. One Italian multi-national is also in
competition
with it's own suppliers for RP! Others get EC money for research
and use it
to develop third party service work. Not a pretty picture . . .
This is a major concern for universities as well. We recognize that we
could have an unfair competitive advantage due to the subsidization of
our equipment costs. At the University of Dayton we have extensive RP
facilities including SLA250, SLS2000, FDM, Sanders, LOM (3). We have
made a firm policy that we will not enter into competition with service
bureaus, some of which have been started by our former students. We
will build single parts for companies seeking to evaluate systems and/or
the application of RP technology to their industry. We make it known up
front that we will not do production work and, as soon as have "hooked"
a customer on the usefulness of RP, we suggest that interested companies
select their own equipment or work with one of the excellent local
service bureaus. In today's contracting research funding environment,
it is tempting to help defray costs by performing service bureau work.
We think that this is shortsighted. We encourage service bureaus to
work with universities in a mutually beneficial environment. There are
mutually supportive roles that will benefit each. We welcome industries
that want to participate in this environment.
Allan Lightman
-----------------------------------------------
Allan J. Lightman, Ph.D. http://www.udri.udayton.edu/rpdl
Senior Research Scientist
University of Dayton Research Institute
300 College Park
Dayton, OH 45469-0150, USA
T: +1-937-229-3966
lightman@udri.udayton.edu
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