In manufacturing, technology is front and center. If I could take you on a tour of our facility it may surprise you just how much we rely on semiconductors, technology, artificial intelligence etc. and the human capital to keep them all running in sync. So when calculating the use of a POET product in industrial manufacturing, one has to take many things into account. Types of technologies, economies of scale, funciton and form as it applies to assembly procedures, master control units, data banks, memory sets, you name it. A great, great number of processors and processes rely on semiconductors in industrial field.

To get an up-close look at how the new technologies are already disrupting the old ways of doing things, consider Nike Inc. 's Flyknit shoe.

An upper for Nike's Flyknit shoe. Nike

As high tech as some sneakers may be in materials and appearance, almost all of them are still made on assembly lines that put a shockingly heavy emphasis on human labor. Workers sit side by side in enormous facilities, cutting material and stitching and gluing shoe components together. But, starting last year, Nike began making the Flyknit a whole new way.

The company's engineers modified a machine used to make sweaters into a shoe-making contraption that knits the entire upper portion of the shoe in a single cocoon-like piece that is then attached to the tongue and to the sole. As the shoe is stitched, proprietary software instructs the machine to alter the materials being used—a bit more polyester thread here, a bit more there—to add strength or flexibility where needed.

A Bespoke Products leg. Bespoke Products

Most important, it makes all these refinements at no added cost. The technology allowed Nike to make a shoe with just a few parts instead of dozens and with up to 80% less waste. "The Nike Flyknit is the world's first mass-produced consumer product made using additive manufacturing," says Maurice Conti, director of strategic innovation at Autodesk, which worked with Nike on the Flyknit project. "It's a hugely significant advance, not the least because, once you start doing things this way it obviously takes a lot of the labor cost out of the equation."