The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
A few years ago, a friend of mine returned from visiting her family in Greece. Knowing that I loved to try new wines, she brought me a bottle that she said was her parents’ favorite. She told me it...
Ryan E. Day
“The experiments we’re undertaking today will lead to an all-new model of transportation and mobility within the next 10 years and beyond.” —Mark Fields, president and CEO, Ford Motor Co.
Mark...
Ryan E. Day
The fact is, we humans usually think much bigger than we can do. When that happens, collaborating to bring ideas to fruition becomes crucial for success. From that first time a woolly mammoth made...
Akhilesh Gulati
In today’s world, it’s almost expected that product or service innovation will yield competitive advantage. So how does one innovate? One approach is to hire genius employees and to combine the...
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
During the early 2000s, Allan Goldman, M.D., a chief physician at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, a children’s hospital in London, observed that too many mistakes were being made when patients...
Dawn Bailey
At a recent Boston University-hosted event, leading healthcare professionals pitched innovative ideas on how to solve the nation’s most pressing problems on a tight budget. Eight teams had two...
Matthew E. May
I get the question all the time, especially from organizations that have significant investment in some process improvement program—like a lean Six Sigma or lean kaizen initiative. (I...
Bruce Hamilton
Last week marked the 100th anniversary of the introduction of a moving assembly line at Henry Ford’s Highland assembly plant, an innovation that inaugurated mass production.
Ford was not the first...
MIT News
The U.S. economy retains myriad sources of innovative capacity—but not enough of the innovations occurring in America today reach the marketplace, according to a major two-year MIT study.
The...
NIST
The manufacturing workforce—so critical to manufacturing innovation—is the basic, yet decisive, building block for successfully implementing next-generation strategies. If manufacturers are to...
MIT News
You may have seen little squares of Tcho chocolate in their brightly colored wrappers decorated with futuristic parabolas of gold and silver. They’re easily found: Starbucks has sold them; Whole...
Akhilesh Gulati
Editor’s note: This article continues the series exploring structured innovation using the TRIZ methodology, a problem-solving, analysis, and forecasting tool derived from studying patterns of...
MIT News
Prizes have long been used to induce solutions to national challenges. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, prizes yielded vaccine inoculation, lifeboats, a method of calculating longitude at sea,...
NIST
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced nearly $2 million in Phase I and Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards to 12 U.S. businesses. These awards...
Knowledge at Wharton
It was 2003, exactly 56 years after Ole Kirk Christiansen bought the first plastic injection molding machine in Denmark to start manufacturing plastic bricks for building-block toys. On the surface,...
MIT News
Not long ago, MIT political scientist Suzanne Berger was visiting a factory in western Massachusetts, a place that produces the plastic jugs you find in grocery stores. As she saw on the factory...
Knowledge at Wharton
Innovation is a tough word to define, but most would say they know it when they see it. At a recent Wharton Women in Business conference, participants were asked to discuss their personal...
Stewart Anderson
Few would argue with the proposition that a firm’s well-being depends upon its ability to innovate. Firms that lack the capacity to develop new and improved offerings which satisfy customer needs...
Akhilesh Gulati
Cooking is not my forte, but I try. I intended my latest concoction to be interesting, new, and easy. It was a soup, made with nontraditional ingredients, and it won rave reviews at a neighborhood...
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
“What makes a personal kanban any better than a to-do list?” asked Julie, crossing out a completed task on her “ta da!” list with exaggerated strokes.
“With personal kanban you visualize your work,...
