Innovation

Unlock My Product Data! Business Intelligence in PLM

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.

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).

Idea Management as a Software Ecosystem

What I learned this week … came from some research I have been doing for a client. As a part of it, I have been spending a little more time getting to know the “Idea Management” software space. The conclusion that I am drawing is that while there are some mature software solutions to manage ideas, there are also a host of other specialty solutions that help generate the idea in the first place, analyze the idea, or further develop it.

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.

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