I've been thinking of the things I want to focus on in metal additive manufacturing, and came up with these two goals:

Reduce the time & effort that independent designers spend developing & validating metal AM parts.
Reduce the time & effort that service providers spend getting their shops capable of reliably making their customers' parts at a profit.

The reason I *don't* mention OEMs here is because I assume that if 1. and 2. are achieved, then the OEMs will be just fine, as they'll have a healthy supply of both engineering talent and manufacturing capabilities available to them. That's not to say that I don't want to help OEMs too, but in my opinion you can have a bigger long term impact (and help save yourself from the client-driven feature creep common in industrial solutions) if you keep small shops' needs in mind.

I have some initial thoughts on how I'd begin to address these, but I'm still in the process of developing them. If anyone has ideas, I'd love to chat about them - drop me a line!