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.
Engineering
Invention Machine Boosts “Every Day” Innovation Capabilities
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.
Innovating Through an Economic Downturn
Tech-Clarity Insight: Innovating Through an Economic Downturn – A PLM Action Plan for Small to Mid-Size Manufacturers Facing Difficult Times describes how manufacturers can weather the current, global economic downturn. This paper is intended to help manufacturers develop a strategy to make it through tough times and come out ready to take advantage of the…
People Tagging in Product Development
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).
Mining Social Network Emotions and Opinions for Product Development
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.
