Innovation Column Features

NIST's picture
NIST
A new measurement approach proposed by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) could lead to a better way to calibrate computed tomography (CT) scanners, potentially...
Mike Richman's picture
Mike Richman
During the last several centuries, the economy of the modern world emerged from a contract—unwritten, unspoken, almost unrecognized—between risk-takers who started businesses and the hirelings who...
Jesse Lyn Stoner's picture
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Often the words “collaboration,” “coordination,” and “cooperation” are used to describe effective teamwork. But they are not the same, and when we use these words interchangeably, we dilute...
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's picture
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
A research team led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has created a nanoscale “playground” on a chip that simulates the formation of exotic...
Oihab Allal-Chérif's picture
Oihab Allal-Chérif
In just five short months, two Boeing 737 Max 8 airliners crashed, killing a total of 346 passengers and crew members. Both crashes occurred shortly after takeoff, and the similarities between the...
Taran March @ Quality Digest's picture
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Life science companies are no strangers to data, so it would be easy to assume they are adept at making innovative use of huge amounts. Not necessarily. A tradition of rigorous scientific method and...
Jason Davis's picture
Jason Davis
Competition among ride-sharing companies is intensifying in Southeast Asia, a region where the growth of smartphone use is among the fastest in the world, and the number of smartphone owners could...
Iva Danilovic's picture
Iva Danilovic
New software solutions, designed to help companies digitalize their supply chains, are improving methods of carrying out field work. Transparency of productivity is becoming the driving force of...
Marlon Walker's picture
Marlon Walker
Robots have been a part of industry longer than you might think. The patent for the first industrial robot, Unimate, was granted in 1961. While robots were sometimes utilized by larger manufacturers...
Joseph Warren Walker III's picture
Joseph Warren Walker III
Lately, the term “innovator” conjures up the image of a young entrepreneur disrupting an industry with concepts like ridesharing, e-currency, or meal-kit delivery. But it doesn’t have to. Whether you...
MIT News's picture
MIT News
A novel system developed at MIT uses RFID tags to help robots home in on moving objects with unprecedented speed and accuracy. The system could enable greater collaboration and precision by robots...
Lee McIntyre's picture
Lee McIntyre
The life choices that had led me to be sitting in a booth underneath a banner that read “Ask a Philosopher” at the entrance to the New York subway at 57th and 8th were perhaps random but inevitable...
NIST's picture
NIST
Engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) needed a way to secure smart manufacturing systems using the digital thread, so they turned to the new kid on the block......
Rachel Plotnik's picture
Rachel Plotnik
All day every day, throughout the United States, people push buttons—on coffee makers, TV remote controls, and even social media posts they “like.” For more than seven years, I’ve been trying to...
Jeffrey Phillips's picture
Jeffrey Phillips
I went to a meeting about innovation recently with a former client, and a discussion about digital transformation broke out. It was both interesting and strange. Most corporations are struggling to...
David L. Chandler's picture
David L. Chandler
Applying just a bit of strain to a piece of semiconductor or other crystalline material can deform the orderly arrangement of atoms in its structure enough to cause dramatic changes in its properties...
Zach Y. Brown's picture
Zach Y. Brown
Imagine there was a store where there were no prices on items, and you never knew what you’d pay until you’d picked out your purchases and were leaving the shop. You might be skeptical that the store...
Ryan E. Day's picture
Ryan E. Day
In the manufacturing universe, metal tube fabrication is a world of its own. That being said, the requirements for developing a new world-standard solution for tube bending are common to all...
Quality Digest's picture
Quality Digest
Within the life science industry, federal and industry regulations have prompted the need for compliance, and that trend has only increased in magnitude and complexity. Along with that has come...
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest's picture
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
Compliance to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations has come a long way in the past 30 years. Here are the main changes. Have they affected your business? 1988: Food and Drug...