TCT Hall of Fame | Fried Vancraen | Founder and CEO of Materialise

The final inductee into the TCT Hall of Fame for 2017 is Wilfried Vancraen, founder and CEO of Materialise.

Though the other Hall of Famers can claim to have invented much of the hardware that runs in factories and on engineers' desks across the globe, it was Fried who made it run.

Much of the early technology was simply unusable; unreliable and prone to failure. Fried and his team in Leuven, Belgium had faith that 3D printing technology could change the way we make things forever, so he developed build processers and software to increase reliability and repeatability.

At the same time, Fried built perhaps the world's largest 3D printing bureau and pursued high-end applications like medical devices where he believed 3D printing could have the most significant impact. Fried's vision held firm and Materialise now produce over 150,000 patient-specific devices per year, improving surgeries and therefore lives.