3-D printing — or, as it’s known in the industry, “additive manufacturing” — is constantly in the news.

NASA is programming 3-D printers to print food for astronauts in orbit, and there are 3-D printers that create houses in concrete. You can even get your personal 3-D printer to produce colorful figurines.

The 3-D printing industry just surpassed $5.1 billion globally, and Hawaii students are getting in on the action. I recently spent a day with Hawaii Pacific University graduate students studying additive manufacturing with Harm-Jan Steenhuis, professor of management and international business, and director of HPU’s Master of Business Administration program.

While they did get to experiment with small, home-use 3-D printers, their interest was in what kinds of business opportunities can be created in Hawaii and around the world.

Food is a huge opportunity, and the work NASA is doing for the space station just scratches the surface.

Mariah Campbell, working on her M.B.A., got the epiphany that 3-D food manufacturing could be particularly relevant for developing countries where nutritional problems are rampant because of limited diet. Using 3-D methods, new types of snacks, particularly for children, could be quickly produced from nutritious food stocks. It also may be possible to produce emergency food much more cheaply by printing from stocks rather than shipping in full prepackaged meals as is traditionally done in times of disaster.

Kerry Campbell, completing her M.A. in global leadership and sustainable development, is also interested in 3-D printing of food, but with a different demographic in mind. She’s interested in the U.S. aging population where the maintenance of diets in care facilities is a constant problem. She found that many people in these facilities become unhappy with their required diet and demand items such as hamburgers, which are simply unavailable. In some cases, patients become so unhappy at being refused the food, they become violent and must be restrained to be fed.

3-D printing can create versions of these foods that meet the special nutritional requirements of these patients and provide the gustatory satisfaction they crave. She has been exploring how this could not only make the patients happier, but reduce costs by requiring fewer staff. The production of something that could be presented as what they want could reduce the stress and misery for everyone. 3-D printing can be a solution to these issues.

On A completely different track, Carl Estenik, also in the M.A. global leadership and sustainable development program, did a project with 3-D printers on biological tissue printing, which entails printing living tissues for treatment of injuries or organ replacement. Estenik has a personal interest in this as his 4-year-old son already has had a liver transplant. In his research, Estenik discovered that we are close to being able to print not just tissues for human and animal use, but whole organs. (While this is still a few years away, it would reduce or, ultimately, eliminate the need for human donors.)

The upshot of this program is that we need to think of Hawaii as a place where manufacturing has a future. As the HPU grad students I met discovered, 3-D printing can spawn an array of new business opportunities that were never possible in the Aloha State. The spectrum of new products is as wide- ranging as our imagination.

While chatting with the HPU students, I was thrilled to receive a plastic whistle that they had printed just for me.

Mike Meyer is chief information officer for Honolulu Community College. Reach him at mmeyer@hawaii.edu.