Innovation Column Features

Phanish Puranam's picture
Phanish Puranam
As businesses increasingly adopt AI-driven decision making, experts agree that the most interesting questions are not about whether humans can beat machines or vice versa, but how the two forms of...
MIT News's picture
MIT News
First published June 29, 2021, on MIT News. MIT and Harvard University have announced a major transition for edX, the nonprofit organization they launched in 2012 to provide an open online...
Matt Fieldman's picture
Matt Fieldman
This article is the fourth in a monthly series brought to you by the America Works initiative. As a part of the MEP National Network’s goal of supporting the growth of small and medium-sized...
Zach Winn's picture
Zach Winn
This story was originally published by MIT News. Whether it’s computer chips, smartphone components, or camera parts, the hardware in many products is constantly getting smaller. The trend is pushing...
Katherine H. Freeman's picture
Katherine H. Freeman
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine. In 2020, the annual committee meeting of the journal we edit was a bit of a mess. It took place in March, just days before the World Health...
Glenn Daehn's picture
Glenn Daehn
Failure of a machine in a factory can shut it down. Lost production can cost millions of dollars per day. Component failures can devastate factories, power plants, and battlefield equipment. To...
Doug Devereaux's picture
Doug Devereaux
The premise for the NIST MEP Digital Supply-Chain Network project is familiar to MEP centers—many small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) are often not ready for Industry 4.0 and don’t know how...
Brian C. Black's picture
Brian C. Black
When President Joe Biden took Ford’s electric F-150 Lightning pickup for a test drive in Dearborn, Michigan, in May 2021, the event was more than a White House photo op. It marked a new phase in an...
Paul Laughlin's picture
Paul Laughlin
Do you see the limitations and over-hyped expectations of today’s approach to artificial intelligence (AI)? Does it need a reboot, a redirection, to finally achieve its potential, one that truly...
Innovating Service With Chip Bell's picture
Innovating Service With Chip Bell
When you played cowboys and Indians as a kid, did you want to be the cowboy or the Indian? I wanted to be the Indian. All the ones I saw in comic books had super-cool moccasins and could move around...
Dawn Bailey's picture
Dawn Bailey
In 2020, MESA, a small business in Oklahoma, became to date the first and only three-time Baldrige Award recipient. From a one-person consulting firm founded in 1979, MESA has grown to support a...
Anne Trafton's picture
Anne Trafton
First published June 7, 2021, on MIT News. MIT engineers have discovered a new way of generating electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create a current simply by interacting with liquid...
Harry Hertz's picture
Harry Hertz
Each year after the Quest for Excellence Conference, I sift through my notes and try to identify themes I have heard in the presentations of the new Baldrige Award recipients. The most...
Adam J. Fleisher's picture
Adam J. Fleisher
In an essay titled “The end of artefacts,” Nobel laureate and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) fellow William D. Phillips details how scientists came to realize the original...
Innovating Service With Chip Bell's picture
Innovating Service With Chip Bell
We live in an era of statue removal. Meanwhile the largest mountain carving in the world is under construction in the Black Hills of South Dakota just 17 miles from Mount Rushmore. The final carving...
Caroline Zimmerman's picture
Caroline Zimmerman
With big data and artificial intelligence (AI) transforming business, it’s almost certain that every executive will need to leverage these technologies at some point to advance their organization—and...
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's picture
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Plastics are a part of nearly every product we use on a daily basis. The average person in the United States generates about 100 kg of plastic waste per year, most of which goes straight to a...
Benjamin Kessler's picture
Benjamin Kessler
Suddenly, supply chains are in the spotlight. The practical details of how products arrive on supermarket shelves, for example, gained unwelcome relevance amid last year’s wave of panic buying caused...
James Wells's picture
James Wells
I was talking recently with a friend who runs an academic program at a major U.S. university. She was telling me about solving a problem in her department and how the solution was obvious so she just...
Eric Brown's picture
Eric Brown
This story was originally published by MIT News. Blade Kotelly is a senior lecturer at MIT on design thinking, user interfaces, and innovation. His enthusiasm for cars is intertwined with his...