Clarity on PLM

A quick peek into some research on … the use of social computing and “Web 2.0″ techniques to enhance product collaboration. The report, Issue in Focus: Product Collaboration 2.0 - Using Social Computing Techniques to Create Corporate Social Networks not only discusses how social media and Internet-based technologies can improve product collaboration in corporate social networks, but also how manufacturers’ use of social computing allows them to capture and leverage the interactions as a new source of corporate product knowledge.

The Research Findings

One of the key messages of the report is that companies are starting to embrace social computing and “Web 2.0” capabilities to take advantage of social media for business purposes, creating “corporate social networks.” It is important for many companies to make a clear distinction between personal use of social media (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, etc.) and “real work” using social computing. While many large companies have shut down access to social media sites, these same concepts offer the ability for engineers, product developers, marketers, manufacturing resources, sourcing, and others in the product innovation process to share and contribute.

There are two primary threads to the research:

• Improving Collaboration – As reported in my previous post and research Going Social with Product Development, capabilities like presence detection and interactive file sharing help make existing collaborative processes better. This is particularly important to replace the day-to-day “water cooler” conversations that have disappeared in today’s globally dispersed, virtual organizations and support processes such as concurrent engineering. For example, manufacturers can create a virtual “community space” to give team members a central location for information. This collaboration extends beyond Engineering as well, and helps product developers include downstream considerations from Manufacturing, Purchasing, Quality, Service, and other departments early in the design process.
• Capturing Product Knowledge – Another key finding of the research is that as manufacturers adopt social computing in PLM, they are developing a digital record of the product development process. Decisions, discussions, false starts, brainstorms, and other interactions can now be captured and stored electronically. Using PLM, they can also be associated to the product and the project to form a permanent record of the process. By integrating this social interaction with search capabilities in PLM (see Unlock My Product Data! Business Intelligence in PLM), the potential to turn collaboration into a corporate asset is tremendous. Beyond capturing internal knowledge, corporate social networks can also be used to collaborate with suppliers and customers to gain better insights into the “voice of the customer,” capture requirements, and generate new product ideas - developing new knowledge and intellectual property (IP).

Implications for Manufacturers

There are significant business benefits to be unlocked by applying social computing techniques to product development. Manufacturers have an opportunity to improve collaboration inside and outside of the enterprise by leveraging these new techniques. After all, social computing is about sharing content within a community. Isn’t that what collaboration is all about? Sharing and getting feedback? And while the thought of using Facebook or Twitter to share your intellectual property may not sound that appealing (as we discussed in Flogging the Facebook for Product Development Horse), the same concepts are being applied to (and integrated with) PLM.  I believe that these capabilities will be a big part of product innovation moving forward, and that companies that get started sooner will have a big advantage over their peers. This is a new and exciting frontier, and we all need to explore and learn so we can tap the new potential ahead of the competition.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on social computing and collaboration, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? What are your plans? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective.

And as always, please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

A quick peek into some research on … the recovery of the software and hardware industry in this AP piece Analyst firm says tech sector to recover in 2010. The data has me thinking about what state the PLM market will be in this year. From all signs I can see, things are looking much better. I am looking forward to hearing from some of my peers in the analyst community that cover PLM directly, but for now here are some thoughts and – as always – my thoughts on how this will impact manufacturers.

The Research Findings

Here are some snipits from the AP release:

• Forrester Research Inc. … expects global spending on technology products and services to grow 8.1 percent in 2010, to more than $1.6 trillion
• Forrester also said U.S. spending is expected to rise 6.6 percent, to $568 billion
• Last fall Gartner Inc. forecast 3.3 percent growth in global technology spending
• IDC, said in December that worldwide tech spending would grow 3.2 percent in 2010

These are very good numbers. The fact that they don’t agree doesn’t bother me because it is not clear that the big gorillas in the analyst community have any standard definition of the market, they use different data sources, and as all manufacturers know a forecast by definition is wrong. But if you look at each of these, they are trending positive. With that in mind, we know several things:

• The software market is expected to recover
• PLM was growing rapidly (double digit growth) prior to the downturn
• The PLM value proposition is stronger than ever, and more companies have proven the value

I am not an economist, but I like the way this looks for 2010. I have also had the opportunity to talk to a number of manufacturers, and they are still very excited about PLM. I expect demand will be for core PLM, but also for other product innovation, product development, and engineering solutions as I mentioned in my post Mythbusting Product Innovation and PLM 2010 Predictions.

Implications for Manufacturers

Hopefully you and your vendor made it through the downturn. The past year saw many manufacturers take a survive and thrive approach to the market, leaning out to make it through the down market but innovating to be ready to capitalize on the recovery. This time was very though on software vendors as well. Although there were acquisitions, there was not a mass market consolidation as some might have predicted. If your vendor made it to see 2010, the chances are pretty good they will have a better year this year. Hopefully, all of us in the manufacturing and manufacturing software community will.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on Product Lifecycle Management in 2010, I hope you found it interesting. I am looking forward to COFES (Congress for the Future of Engineering Software) where Cyon Research will report on the buying intentions of manufacturing and engineering companies. I had the opportunity to join Brad Holtz in conducting and presenting part of last year’s research on the impact of the economy on the engineering software market, and plan to do the same in Scottsdale this year.

Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective. Please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

A quick peek into some research on … the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. The report, The State of Enterprise Adoption Q4 2009, is an interesting read from the “2.0 Adoption Council.” The analysis is brief, but the insights are strong and the authors promise more detail in the future. My first introduction to the research came from a blog post on ReadWrite Enterprise titled Enterprise 2.0: Study Shows Adoption is Real with a strong statement that “Manufacturing Has Surprising High Adoption.”

State of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

I would suggest reading the underlying research, because (as you will see below) I have a different interpretation of the results. But with my high level of interest in Social Computing in Product Development and PLM I do see some positive signs from the study. Thanks to Oleg for his Enterprise 2.0 Adoption and Social PLM post which pointed me to a blog (and then subsequently to the underlying research). I have a slightly different take on the implications of the findings, but that may be because research is frequently left open for some level of interpretation. Regardless, we both agree that things are moving in a positive direction in regards to PLM and social computing.

The Research Findings

As always, I encourage you to read the study. The report clearly shows that participants are adopting “Enterprise 2.0.” The report itself does not provide a definition of Enterprise 2.0, but because the participants were pre-qualified I assume they have a good understanding. For the rest of us, here is a definition we can use that I took from Wikepedia:

Enterprise social software (also known as or regarded as a major component of Enterprise 2.0), comprises social software as used in “enterprise” (business/commercial) contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to corporate intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication.

The report shows that the majority of survey participants still see Enterprise 2.0 in the stages of early adoption. But in their own companies, there are typically multiple projects going on. This to me indicates that there will clearly be leaders and laggards in the adoption of social computing techniques in the enterprise. This is where companies will be able to differentiate themselves and gain advantage over their competition.

Manufacturing is well represented in the survey respondents, but I wouldn’t read too much into that. The industry chart just shows the participants in the research, and the fact that 15 companies out of 77 that took the survey describe themselves as “high tech” and 7 describe themselves as “manufacturing” doesn’t really point to a larger trend that manufacturing is leading in social computing. What I do find interesting is the anecdotal comments in the report that “It is heartening to see that a drive to improve collaboration has taken hold in an industry (manufacturing) which is notoriously difficult to change rapidly” and “… our manufacturing members express the most frustration with introducing change.” This clearly reflects the conversations I have been having with manufacturers.

Implications for Manufacturers

So what does this mean for manufacturers? As much as I would love to jump to the conclusion that social computing is booming, I interpret this differently. I see this as:

• Manufacturers are very interested in social computing
• The early adopters are hard at work figuring it out
• Progress has been cautious (for the most part)

My beliefs on how manufacturers will adopt social computing in product development has not changed:

• Most manufacturers will start with the low-hanging fruit of improving collaboration, and most will start internally
• Manufacturers will be more likely to adopt social computing techniques when they are incorporated into applications they trust such as PLM, which will protect their intellectual property (IP)
• There will be significant value gained by those manufacturers that adopt social computing to improve product innovation, product development, and engineering performance

This study offers some good validation that some thought-leading manufacturers are moving towards Enterprise 2.0. I wouldn’t read too much into it in regards to a general trend, but there is clearly something going on that manufacturers need to learn about and start experimenting with.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on the adoption of Enterprise 2.0, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective. Please feel free to review more free research and white papers from Tech-Clarity.

What I learned this week… came from a Twitter message responding to my blog. I thought that seemed appriorate given that we were discussing social computing and social networking. The message was in response to a post the other day about Going Social with Product Development, pointing me to the embedded video. The post discussed the use of social computing techniques in product innovation, product development, and engineering. 

Note: Thanks to 3DPerspectives for passing this along

The Video

This video is a very straight-forward explanation, using simple terms and a practical example. Well done.

Implications for Manufacturers

I focused more on the internal uses in my research, because I feel those will be the first capabilities adopted. What I liked is that this video really focuses more on innovation in external communities. While I think this kind of example involves more thinking in regards to where the business value lies as compared to collaboration within the corporate social network, I also think the potential for developing a unique and compelling business model is higher and may offer higher returns. I think it’s good for manufacturers to start adopting social computing in their current PLM environment, while exploring the benefits of leveraging external communities for greater innovation.

So just a short and sweet link to the video with some of my thoughts, I hope you found it interesting.

I had the chance to talk with … Siemens PLM a couple of times in response to my post on Quality Lifecycle Management titled Expanding PLM’s Pervue – Quality and Risk Management. While I mentioned that some of the major PLM vendors had developed solutions for quality management, I did not mention Siemens PLM. The reason for not mentioning them, I explained, is that I didn’t know about their solution! I since had a good conversation with the Siemens team about their offering. It is interesting, takes a bit of a unique approach, and I think it is worth talking about. So here it is!

What do they Offer?

What I find unique about the Siemens Dimensional Planning and Validation (DPV) solution is that it does not replicate what standalone Quality Risk Management (QRM) and Quality Lifecycle Management vendors offer. It is a relatively unique approach, which also makes it a complementary solution.  One of the main things things that manufacturers can do to improve quality is to “close the loop” on quality by feeding actual results back into the manufacturing and design processes to improve quality. That is what the Siemens solution does.

Providing feedback on quality to upstream functions  is one of those concepts that is obvious to most people, few will disagree with, but most companies don’t do. Why? It is hard to cross organizational boundaries and get people to work together. Frequently, Engineering and Manufacturing don’t have access to information (or at least information that they trust.) Sometimes, as I am sure some will point out, they just don’t listen. What I like about the Siemens solution is that the feedback is quantitative and based on actuals. In fact, what the solution does is take actual dimension product measurements (typically from automated testing equipment) from the shop floor and provide feedback upstream.

By tracking actual dimensional results by plant, production run, and other manufacturing parameters the solution offers the ability to analyze performance over time and look for improvement opportunities. One of the key elements that makes this beneficial is the analytical engine behind it, similar to other trends to use business intelligence (BI) in PLM. Another nice feature is that the results become a part of the PLM data model, and can even be shown against the 3D model. The goal is to provide feedback to Engineers so they can adjust designs, features, tolerances, and inspection points to improve quality by design. In short, they are closing the loop.

Siemens explained the value in simple terms, which I will use as the last words for this section. I think these words some sum up the difference in their solution, because it is based on actual results, uses analytics and allerts to provide the right information to Engineers, and puts the results into the product/PLM context to be shared broadly across the enterprise. In their words, the solution helps manufacturers:

“Find it quicker, fix it faster, share the knowledge“

Who do they Work with?

This solution is primarily intended for discrete manufacturers with dimensionally based parts. The early development customer that Siemens worked with is in the automotive industry, where quality is critical and production volumes are high enough to make this feedback useful. Other similar industries can benefit from this as well.

So that’s what I hear from Siemens PLM, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them?

A quick peek into some research on … the use of business intelligence in PLM provides insight on taking advantage of the tremendous amount of product data  accumulating in today’s PLM systems. The research discusses how the maturation of manufacturers’ PLM implementations has created a tremendous volume of untapped information that can be leveraged to improve product innovation, product development, and engineering performance. As it has in previous enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, SCM, others), the time has come for manufacturers to tap into their growing information goldmines through the use of business intelligence (BI) tools.

The Research Findings

The research points out two parallel trends in PLM implementations today:

• Manufacturers have moved forward along the PLM implementation maturity curve – meaning they now have stable implementations and clean data
• PLM has evolved and expanded to incorporate more valuable, business-focused data in addition to technical information – meaning the data to be mined covers a broader spectrum of the product lifecycle, including cost, projects, sourcing, service, and more in addition to purely technical engineering data

The result of these two trends is that there is now a lot more usable business data in PLM. The report points out a number of areas of value that can be mined from the data, including savings on new product development timelines, closing the loop from service to engineering, improving product quality, analyzing sourcing, and reducing cost. In short, it shows that value can be extracted by improving pretty much any part of the product innovation, product development, and engineering processes. Please read the report for more details and examples.

Implications for Manufacturers

The message for manufacturers is that “there is gold in them hills” …. errrrrr, in those databases. The research also points out some special considerations for business intelligence in a PLM environment. For most manufacturers, applying a BI tool is not the difficult part. In fact, they probably have (at least) one tool available in their IT toolkit. But before diving in from a technical perspective, manufacturers need to be very careful to consider security, IP protection, and regulatory requirements that surround this very sensitive data. Manufacturers should also look for ways to leverage PLM vendor offerings or partnerships that give them a ready-made view into the PLM data and security model, to avoid spending time recreating the wheel and potentially making mistakes that provide misleading “facts” that people will trust. As the report says, “Developing an effective BI in PLM strategy also requires knowledge of the engineering and product development domains and the specific software applications being mined.”

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on the maturation of PLM implementations and the opportunity it provides for data mining in PLM, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective.

Please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

What I learned this week … came from watching the Did You Know 3.0 Video and asking myself what it means to the world of manufacturing and product lifecycle management (PLM). The answer? Quite a lot. If you haven’t seen the video, it is worth 5 minutes of your time to give you an entertaining and informative look into the times we live in. The part that really caught me was that we live in “exponential times.” Things are changing rapidly in our personal and professional lives, and manufacturers need to consider the ways the world is changing in order to be relevant with the right products (and the right processes) to capitalize on the future.

Note: Thanks to Randall Newton at CADCAMNet for posting the link. I have seen this before, but his post was what made me really think about it.

Did You Know?

The video, if you haven’t seen it before, tries to put the world in perspective through facts and pictograms. I have seen these before, and they are always thought-provoking.  According to the source, this was put together by Karl Fisch and modified by Scott McLeod. Some of the key takeaways for me are:

• MySpace has 200 million subscribers, if it were a country it would be 5th largest in the world
• A week’s worth of the New York Times holds as much information as an average person would come across in a lifetime in the 18th century
• The amount of technical information doubles every two years
• The number of text messages sent/received in a day exceeds the population of the planet
• The time it took for a product/technology to reach a market audience of 50 million:
  • Radio – 38 years
  • Television – 13 years
  • iPod – 3 years
  • FaceBook – 2 years

Further, there are some fascinating facts about the increased capabilities of computing technologies.

What Does it All Mean (for Manufacturing and PLM)?

The video ends with a question – “What Does it All Mean?” – without providing an answer. The answer, of course, depends on who you are and how the changes impact your world.  When I watched this, I tried to take the perspective of what impacts this will have on product innovation, product development, engineering, and manufacturing. Further, I tried to consider how this will impact the software solutions that help support product lifecycle management. There are challenges and opportunities on the way. Here are my thoughts:

• Social networking is exploding – this offers a tremendous benefit for manufacturers that want to use social computing in PLM to improve collaboration and dramatically change the way they interact with their markets and customers.
• Knowledge is exploding – manufacturers have a tremendous challenge to manage their own information and intellectual property, let alone be able to access and leverage the information available across the globe. Search, Knowledge Management (KM), and Business Intelligence (BI) will become bigger requirements inside PLM and to drive product innovation by tapping into global knowledge sources. Social computing will also play a role here, as manufacturers try to discover the people with the right knowledge in addition to knowledge.
• Time to market is evaporating – the time lag between a technical advance and the commercialization is disappearing. This makes new product development (NPD) critical, but also further supports the need to rapidly discover and take advantage of knowledge anywhere in the world. It also means that manufacturers will have to get their products right the first time, or someone else will take the market away from them.
• Computing power is exploding – the exponential growth of computing power will play a large role in what PLM vendors are able to do with their software, opening up new opportunities including continued expansion of 3D, animation, and simulation in the way we interact with products.

So that is some insight on the times we live in and my thoughts on the implications for manufacturing and PLM, I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t. And I am sure I missed something, feel free to add. And for those that watched the video, please pass along any ideas on how to get that music out of my head!

Please feel free to review related perspectives, free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

I had the chance to talk with … Jim Todhunter and the team at Invention Machine about the new product release they announced today. There are lot of things that I like in the release designed to help further Invention Machine’s ability to operationalize innovation. But what really struck me was the goal of this release to improve “Every Day Innovation” in a procedural, sustainable way.

What do they Do?

In short, and in my words, Invention Machine offers a software solution that helps manufacturers turn innovation into a repeatable process. This is what I like to call “operationalizing innovation” as opposed to leaving innovation to chance. Invention Machine does this through a combination of:

• Task-oriented innovation workflows
• Packaged innovation, engineering and problem-solving tools and methodologies
• Innovation and engineering knowledge management and search

Invention Machine is a very unique company, and one that many have a hard time grasping exactly what they do. But what always strikes me is that they have a very impressive list of customers. I have had the chance to talk with quite a few of these customers, and they are all positive about what Invention Machine has done for them. So even if they are hard to understand, they are definitely worth a look.

What’s New?

So what is new in the release? There is quite a bit. Their Goldfire 5.5 launch adds new capabilities across the product line, and also introduces a new product called “Goldfire Insight.” The goal of this solution is to boost deployment of Goldfire to the “every day” innovators. Innovation comes in many forms, and Invention Machine is trying to extend their capabilities into every day engineering and innovation problem solving instead of just generating the big ideas or solving big, hairy problems. Jim Todhunter talks about the “little i” ind of innovation in addition to the “big I” type. Maybe one way to think of it is that Goldfire Insight helps the every day innovator stand on the shoulders of the master innovators to turn innovation into reality.

There are also new capabilities in the existing solutions. One of these capabilities is a question answering technology that helps innovators find the knowledge they need to get their jobs done without reinventing the wheel. There is also a new Knowledge Navigator that helps return knowledge in logical categories or “lenses,” providing order and intelligence to unstructured information and query results by leveraging Invention Machine’s strong semantic search capabilities.

There is also a new Research Guide that I am pretty interested in seeing in action at customers. The Research Guide not only helps capture engineering knowledge, it helps capture the innovation and decision-making process. Think of dynamically creating a “mind map” during a research or innovation project that documents the path you took (and links to the knowledge you uncovered) so you can go back and revisit it at a later time. This creates a new source of knowledge, by documenting the innovation process and the innovation path to create new knowledge. Pretty compelling. I liked the way Jim Todhunter explained it (possibly paraphrased):

Information -> enables -> Communities -> to perform -> Innovation -> which generates -> Information

So that’s what I hear from Invention Machine, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them?

What I learned this week … was sparked by some recent social networking announcements on people tagging. The most recent was that Facebook plans to offer tagging very similar to what Twitter offers. This follows other announcements around geo-tagging, but I am really most interested in how tagging people can help in product development (and overall in product innovation).

Tag – You are It!

Most people that use social networks are getting used to tagging, particularly those that use Twitter. In Facebook, people are used to seeing tagging on uploaded photos. So what is tagging? Tagging (for our purposes here) is just associated a person with content. There are other forms of tagging as well, such as the “#” tagging or “hashcodes” in Twitter than help associate content with events or topics, keyword tagging, etc. But what I am talking about is simply including an individual’s identification along with the content. But I am not talking about their name, I am talking about tagging their online presence. Tagging isn’t just letting people know who is involved. The power of people tagging comes when associating the person to the context allows the tag to be followed to see or learn more about the person tagged.

Quick Example

OK, you are reading a blog on social networking so you probably already know this, but just in case I will provide a quick personal example:

I attended a conference, and one of the people I follow on Twitter mentioned that they were going to the bar with two other individuals. Not that interesting, right? Except that they were at the same conference that I was and my contact tagged the two people by including their “@” codes, or their Twitter identities. That meant that anybody that followed any of the three would now know they were getting together for a drink. So what? I recognized one of the names as somebody I wanted to meet. The second name I didn’t recognize, but I followed the link to the profile and found out it was another blogger that I would like to meet. In short, my network expanded by two new people that day because one friend tagged the other two. And, I got a free drink out of it too.

Can We Get Back to Product Development Please?

Thanks for your patience with the aside, I try not to assume everybody knows about things like tagging. So how does this apply to product development? Let’s take a quick example of status reports. If a status report mentions that @Engineer is working on a problem, I might read that status report and have something to offer. I could instantly click and connect with the tagged person (hopefully with some security settings in place) and offer my advice. Or, perhaps it is a year later and I am facing that same problem. I might search on the issue and find this old status report. Then, I see that @Engineer faced this problem a year ago. I could follow the link and find additional content related to the tagged individual that might help me with my problem, or connect to ask for advice.

Implications for Manufacturers

It’s Monday, I will keep this short. Tagging is a very important part of social computing, and highly applicable to PLM because product development is fundamentally a people-driven process. This is just one more reason that social computing in PLM makes so much sense to me.

Thinking of tagging in product development also ties strongly into past discussions such as Oleg’s PLM, don’t fight processes – focus on people! and other related discussions in the PLM community of late. It is also very important when considering the importance of social discovery and how social computing drives innovation.

So I believe tagging people in social computing will be helpful to product developers, I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t, if you did let us know about it.

What I learned this week …came from an article in The New York Times by Alex Wright. The article, Mining the Web for Feelings not Facts, was a great look into a concept that is new to me, an emerging field called “sentiment analysis.” The article defines sentiment analysis as “translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.” The examples show companies using data analysis techniques to gain insight into what social media (such as social networks and blogs) are saying about their company. My thoughts immediately turned to the value this information would have to product developers to understand how customers feel about their products, and what a great tool this could be in the social computing toolkit for PLM.

Sentiment Analysis

I won’t repeat all of the fascinating things the article says, and instead recommend you take a few minutes to read it. It is very interesting, and an exciting new concept. Here are some of the key points from my perspective:

• Sentiment analysis opens a “window into the collective consciousness of Internet users”
• Opinions are a kind of “virtual currency“
• Social media offers a “rich vein of market intelligence“

The article points out that this is a new, imperfect science and mentions some interesting pioneers of the concept. It also introduces a new book which is on my “to read” list titled Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis by Bo Pang and Lillian Lee.

My Thoughts  – Sentiment Analysis in PLM

So how can this social computing approach be used to develop more profitable products? If we can gather feedback on products, product ideas and competitive offerings rapidly it gives us the opportunity to react early to – or ahead of -  a trend. Many manufacturers are starting to monitor social networking sites like Twitter to see what people are saying, but for the most part it is manual except for filtering on keywords. Currently, the review and analysis depends on people. This is not a sustainable approach for product managers and product marketers to sift through mountains of comments, at least in my opinion. But if social computing techniques can detect and alert them to potential changes in market opinion that they should pay attention to, that could provide the input needed to help steer product development (or at least product marketing, if changing the product quickly is not an option).

Product managers are already overwhelmed with input, and the Internet is creating even more every day. The information is valuable, but takes time to review and interpret. If computing algorithms can help decipher and summarize, then product developers can focus on the important trends as opposed to sifting through the haystack to find them.

Implications for Manufacturers

This is just one more example of how companies are trying to leverage social computing to improve their product innovation, product development, and engineering performance. There is clearly something going on here, something that offers significant advantages to the manufacturers that can figure it out and use social computing to their benefit. This example is part of what I call “social discovery,” which is a more advanced concept than more straight-forward uses of social computing in PLM such as enhancing collaboration. For more thoughts on social computing in PLM, you can click on the “social computing” tag on the ClarityonPLM site, or start with these thoughts on social product development and social computing in PLM.

So can we mine the web for emotions and use that market intelligence to drive product development? I think there is some real potential, among other opportunities that social computing and social networking are opening up. I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t, if you did let us know about it.

Note: No, the picture has absolutely nothing to do with mining social networks, but I Googled “mind reading machines” and this is what came up. It made me smile, so I thought I would share it with you.