Push my ‘innovate’ button?

Push my ‘innovate’ button?

One thing about hanging around with the crew from Cyon Research is that you get to participate in some very interesting – and often heated – discussions about the industry. Much of last week was taken up with meetings with Cyon Research and we ended up in a debate about innovation, PLM, and design. The main yawning gap of consensus in this debate was that while many CAD companies claim to enhance innovation, there is no ‘Innovate’ command on the CAD (or PLM) software systems.

Interestingly, a new writer at Managing Automation, Eric Marks, has started down the same track. In his September 05 article “Is PLM the Answer?” (http://www.managingautomation.com/maonline/magazine/read/4718622) Marks raises some of the same points about PLM that I heard across the dinner table in Spokane,WA last week.

Marks states, “General Motors' business problems are headline material, but the root cause must surely be related to making great products that the market wants, right? The real issue is designing products based on data about what customers really want. But, is this an issue of the intelligent design process, or are intelligent designers the secret? Or is there something else going on?”

Now, let me say that I think Marks’ points about GM combine both correct and flawed responses to GM’s current financial problem. (My thoughts: it is not that they produce bad products but they have to charge too much for them because of their internal financial structures. As soon as prices were artificially brought down, sales rose in a corresponding fashion.) However, his points about PLM are right on the mark: “PLM as a category of software does not address the fundamental question: What is more important, intelligent design or intelligent designers? What about the business decisions that are made upstream from the PLM solutions? Are these considered PLM? Are they part of intelligent design?”

Rick Stavanja, VP of Cyon Research and editor of CADwire.net (www.cadwire.net) agrees. “I agree wholeheartedly with Eric Marks' point of view in his article.  Just as there are no "innovate" commands in today's CAD (or PLM) software, there are no "Is my design right for the market" tools.  CAD/PLM tools are just that -- tools.  People with brains still need to drive them.”

The first question to ask though is: where does innovation occur? Is it a ‘eureka’ moment in the bath or is it when you switch a material in an existing product from metal to plastic, thusly making it 50% cheaper and 70% lighter? I admit my own innovation (normally connected to a problematic corporate message) occurs somewhere around 50 miles or more while driving up Interstate 25 towards Wyoming (ergo: If I reach Cheyenne without an idea, I then admit defeat and go shopping.) Other people concur that their ideas occur in various places that include the shower, the back deck and while watching the Discovery Channel.

But even then, CAD and PLM tools themselves do not have the intelligence that creates a new innovation. The brain of the designer is what counts. All CAD and PLM does is document it.  By Rick’s assessment, the nearest thing so far is CADwire Tech Innovators’ Award winner – IPifini (www.ipifini.com). If anything comes close to an ‘innovation’ button, this is it.

Please do add your comments to this discussion. We want to know what you think.

Comments

[Martyn Day]

(ed. warning. contains original expletives from Martyn which have been kept in to emphasize the points he is making)
I have not read the article but the concept of an innovate button is just crazy. Why not just let a computer develop generations of designs, based on inputs like improved materials and aesthetic taste?

This isn't the way we work. It's like saying let's have a business system and have a profit button, you press it and suddenly your company is making more money!!!

We are all worried about jobs going overseas, if we could add an innovate or profit button to our systems, we wouldn't need employees. You could build a robot to press the button too!!!

What it boils down to is that you can spend all the money you want on design and production technology/ infrastructure. If you have a shit idea, at the wrong time, it's still going to be a shit product when it comes out of the factory. You can refine the process, reign in the costs, re-use the data to save development time on the next generation, decrease stock, improve productivity.... but it's still going to be a shit product, just a highly efficiently produced shit product.

Then again, there's always marketing, which has proven, time and time again, that it's possible to make a market for shit products!
I thank you!

[rdtaggart]

where does innovation come from?

Just found this pointer on Good Morning Silicon Valley
(http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2005/09/quoted_8.html)

""So … as I was sitting on the toilet this morning and I noticed the shiny white porcelain of the bathtub and the reflective chrome of the faucet on the wash basin … and then it hit me! Everybody perceives the iPod as 'clean' because it references bathroom materials!"

from -- A frog design consultant concludes that Apple design guru Jonathan Ives does his best thinking in the same room as everyone else.

[Matt Mason]

While I've never had a chance to use the software, I always thought that Invention Machine (http://www.invention-machine.com/) had the software which came closest to "enabling" innovation... Between structuring the problem correctly to support innovation, and integrating with USPTO and other knowledge sources.

[Alex GT]

It is somewhat frustrating when a vendor sells a product with promises of innovation it cannot deliver. Those PLM companies that state they create innovation are probably stretching reality a bit. PLM can help increase communications and interactions which facilitate an innovative idea permeating the company, but as the author says, there is no button for innovation.

I personally believe that innovation is critical, but usually gets "stuck" in larger corporations due to communication, political, and organizational barriers. This is probably why innovation cycles seem to be faster at smaller companies.

At our company (Lattice3D), our mission has been to enable "3D Everywhere" and thereby share 3D data throughout the company and supply chain. The increase in communications past the typical PLM groups has meant more information and more direct feebdack to designers from field ops, sales, clients, suppliers, etc. Given our client feedback we suspect this increase in data/idea sharing facilitates innovation and reduces design cycles which fosters more and better innovation more rooted in client needs.

This is about as close to the innovate button we've seen.

[Rachael Taggart]

To Martyn's earlier comment.

What I object to is the general claim by the CAD/PLM companies that they improve (enhance, engander) innovation. My view is that CAD only assists with the processes needed while innovation occurs - documenting an idea, testing an idea, proving quite rapidly that it will, or will not, work.

Another point that comes up - when does innvoation occur? is it prior to the product being documented? Is it during the process? If you change a product so it is lighter/better/cheaper even while it has already been innovated, is that a point where innovation is occuring?
I believe the answer is yes to both.
But can CAD make you innovate? Not really. The idea comes from somewhere else....mostly the bathroom I think.

Rach

[Martyn Day]

While on the toilet I couldn't help think that the concept that you think you can automate innovation somehow is so utterly preposterous, who on earth could come up with such an idea. Then reading back, low and behold, it seems to come from the PLM side of the lunatic assylum. If I had a choice of listening to a product evangelist give an empassioned speech about how PLM generates an innovation advantage or hear the mad mumblings of a bi-polar psychotic, schizophreic with a multi-personality disorder, I'd pick the guy who thought he was Jesus everytime. Innovation button, my arse!

[Michael J.]

If you read the preface of nearly any book, the author there will give thanks to a vast array of people, without whose efforts the book never would have taken place. Would their works of creativity have been done if certain people and circumstances had not been in place? Probably not. Would putting those people and circumstances in place surrounding me have had the same results? Definitely not. So the writer, designer, sculptor… is really the key. But without the right “things” in place even the most creative MAY not produce. If innovation doesn’t end up with something, did it ever really happen? Did those people listed in those prefaces enhance or engender the creativity. It seems to me that they all did to some extent. The question is; if you are going to create something it is worth the effort to gather the people and things around you that will assist in the process? And as always we have to measure if it is worth the cost.

But what about tools? You never see an author praising Microsoft Word as one of the things that “made it happen”. But tools definitely do help in our processes of creativity. They certainly can do more than document the creativity. In my craft of software development, tools are an important part of the process. I could write a C# program using a simple text editor. However, using a tool like Microsoft’s Visual Studio really helps the process. It assists so much that I actually spend my thought process on the creative part of the solution and NOT on the process. So Visual Studio has indeed enhanced my ability to innovate. But a different sort of involvement is when I type the name of an object into the editor and then press a “.” Visual Studio will offer a list of all the possible methods and properties available for that object. As I scroll thru that list of choices I see things I never thought of using. It’s not exactly an innovate button but it sure has opened my eyes to possibilities I hadn’t thought of. I have been shown something new. It introduced something new in the process (see http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=innovation ). I think Visual Studio has, at that point, become at the very least a participant in the innovation process. Also, just the fact that I have to only press one button to compile relieves me to try many possible solutions to a problem that I never would have tried if I had to punch cards, deliver them to the processing center and then wait a few hours for the results. Tools can help in many very valuable ways and they in fact can become a full participant in the innovation process.

But really who cares how we define the roles PLM and CAD play in innovation. What we care about is, how we can be more innovative. Well, we really usually want to make more money and we think innovation may be a key to that. Maybe the best way is to spend more time in the bathroom. Maybe companies should provide for longer vacations, maybe we should look at our tools and see if they help or hinder the process. If I were in the business of selling tools for innovators I would certainly try to make and explain how my products are more and more participatory in the innovation process. Innovation is a team process. The team can involve more than people. It can involve software, luck, processes, and a host of other things. This whole discussion all sounds a bit like the current discussions about Jerry Rice being the greatest football player of all time. He has done a lot for a long time but absolutely none of it was where it was only him. Every pass he caught was thrown by someone and the play was designed by someone and there were other people doing their job to make that pass a success. It’s all really a waste of time to try to define the exact combinations of players that make for a wining team. Teams win in football and teams produce innovation and in both winning teams can have different combinations of roles but still win it all. Sometimes you have to be innovative in you approach to team makeup, and I have some software that will do just that….

mj (wiestm?)

[Ed B.]

Never use a computer if you can't do it by hand. They are only tools to help and among the most dumb. CAD/PLM vendors have greatly overrated there own importance in product development and really have not delivered the value they claim. In the past we had innovation without them, yes even with just a drawing board and slide rule. CAD and PLM are no more than a word processor is to an author.

The US auto industry has foisted 50 year old technology on a gullible public who are not them selves technologically savvy and have been sold a marketing line. Overweight over sized obsolete vehicles that are neither payload nor fuel efficient. Deliberately choosing to recycle cheap to produce old product rather than allowing engineering innovation, they deserve a declining market share.

Marketing departments have a grip on the US automobile industry and technical ideas are suppressed with an obligation to shut up and deliver cheaply. Innovation only occurs after the marking strategy fails, as in the 70's and by that time has to follow some one elses lead.

Fortunately not all industries are saddled with the same constraints.