I'm having a strange sense of displacement. A momentus event is taking place in China that most of the world is watching live but I can't because a legacy network has paid lots of money to stop Americans from accessing...

Flying to business meetings and conferences is not only hugely expensive these days, it is hugely polluting. Yes, I know that TED, the World Economic Forum and the Oscars are all "carbon neutral," meaning that they pay people in poor...

Procter & Gamble is one of the 25 companies that make up the S&P/Business Week Global Innovation Index and it's strong fiscal fourth quarter showing in sales and profits reflect it's dedication to innovation. When I last talked to CEO...

Read this: http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html And thanks to Seth Godin for pointing this out....

A continuation from yesterday's story on Nokia's new video conferencing pet. Now with video and tongue-in-cheek dialogues between Finnish researchers.

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When it comes to running an engineering organization, it seems engineering executives are facing pressures that seem to be mounting by the day. Through a survey of over 560 discrete and process manufacturers, Aberdeen has found that while shrinking development schedules is the top pressure (60%), rising raw material costs (32%) and decreasing product price-points (28%) make for a difficult combination for the engineering organization. While identification of differentiated strategies offers executive direction, more detail is often required for the tactical execution of change. The first question to address is a simple one: given their formidable challenges, are any engineering organizations performing well?

The rising commodity and energy costs and the uncertain global economy have all put more pressures on manufacturers than ever before to reduce operating costs on each and every aspect of manufacturing operations. For manufacturers, this requires plants and factories to be available and running at peak performance and producing high quality products at the right time. To achieve these goals companies are developing multiple strategies for asset management at an enterprise level. This Benchmark Report will uncover the pressures that are driving companies to focus on Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), the specific strategic actions companies are taking to address the pressures, and the business and technology enablers that are adopted by manufacturers to effectively manage manufacturing assets. The findings of this report will also uncover some of the emerging trends in the asset management field around the use of energy management initiatives to achieve the ultimate goal of cost reductions in manufacturing operations.

Data from Aberdeen Group's December 2007 Product Innovation Agenda 2010 study found that Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) manufacturers are focused on improving product profitability with a dual focus on increasing revenue and reducing product cost. This is consistent with what Aberdeen found across manufacturers in all other industries, but with an elevated emphasis on cost reduction. To achieve these goals, CPG companies are focusing on bringing innovative products to market ahead of the competition. This is not a new strategy, but it is a particularly acute problem for the consumer goods industry where competition is high and the rewards of bringing innovative products to market are often short-lived before competitors follow with a "me too" product or the next new thing. The good news is that leading companies are starting to implement new business tools including Lean product development, collaboration on product innovation, and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) to address this age-old struggle.

As Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) takes on a larger footprint in the enterprise application ecosystem, manufacturers have begun to attempt to better track product information across the full lifecycle. Often, this takes the form of integration between PLM and an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. While this is the most common area for integration work cited by participants in Aberdeen Group's April 2008 Integrating the PLM Ecosystem report, analysis also found a clear connection to company performance, with leading companies 40% more likely than the Industry Average to have integrated PLM and ERP. But what is more interesting is the fact that as more companies integrate these solutions, the role that PLM plays both in product development and in the enterprise changes.

Data from Aberdeen Group's December 2007 Product Innovation Agenda 2010 study found that automotive manufacturers' product development goals are equally focused on the top and bottom lines. Automotive manufacturers report more attention to cost reduction than their peers in all other industries. However, there is a recognition that corporate growth lies in bringing innovative products to market ahead of the competition. But how can this be done in an industry where competition is fierce, customer's demand high quality at low prices, and supply chains are vast and complex?