Leslie Gordon
Senior Editor
Cyon
Research Corp., Bethesda, Md.,
sponsored the annual three-day
event. About 200 participants built
relationships, listened to industry
experts, and attended technology
briefings. The focus: engineering
technology and key strategies to
help companies succeed today and
into the future. A small sampling
of the event follows.
Keynote speaker Karl Ulrich of the
Wharton School at the Univ. of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia spoke
on how to quantify innovation.
“Valuable innovations are usually
based on statistically exceptional
ideas or opportunities,” he says.
“Many industrial organizations
use a tournament-like method to
find these opportunities. Basically,
companies generate many candidate
ideas and then develop and
filter them until only the best remains.”
A good example comes from a
widely used toothbrush, says Ulrich.
“Company designers first
proposed over 200 designs. The
company narrowed these to the
best 50, and made foam models
for testing. Another filtering process
brought the number down to
five for lab testing. Here, personnel
used mirrors to analyze every aspect
of toothbrush use while people
brushed their teeth. Out of this
came the Oral B toothbrush, which
now has the largest dollar share on
the market.”
Ulrich adds that although a tournament
is not always necessary,
the structure is a useful as a way
to think about innovation statistically.
“To really exploit statistics,
companies should take more draws
from a larger distribution, increase
the mean of the number of ideas,
the variance in quality, and accuracy
in evaluating opportunities,”
he says. “Because companies
don’t have the resources to tackle
many such problems, I developed
software that makes it easier to do
rapid peer evaluations with solid
statistical properties. A recent good
idea winnowed from the software
was brokering medical tourism for
semi-elective surgery.”
Later, at a quiet table, Deelip Menezes
of Sycode software in Goa,
India, showed a few of us one of
his latest innovations: A free, alternative
file format for RP data
exchange that is compatible with,
yet better than .STL, the industry
standard. “The .STL format has
problems,” he says. “For one thing,
it uses inefficient methods to store
data, so files are large. Large files
are hard to transmit via the Internet
and waste storage space.”
Worse yet, .STL doesn’t have any
inbuilt security mechanism, says
Menezes. “.STL files are usually
created from Nurbs models to be
shared with others,” he says. “Back
when .STL was created, there was
little worry about anyone extracting
the underlying Nurbs model. Today’s
reverse-engineering software
makes this easy, resulting in huge
businesses losses. Moreover, many
RP service bureaus store .STL files
on servers as part of online quoting
systems. This leaves valuable data
vulnerable to theft from hackers.”
Menezes says he started OpenRP, a nonprofit initiative, to give industry
free software that can read
and write a new .RP file format.
“An .RP file is created from an STL
file (ASCII or binary) and contains
exactly the same geometric data,”
he says. But .RP significantly compresses
the data. An .RP file is 97%
smaller than its ASCII .STL counterpart
and 90% smaller than its
binary counterpart. In either case,
compression is much greater than
if the .STL file were compressed
with WinZip or any similar compression
program.”
The file-security problem is also
reduced because .RP has two levels
of security: file and user, says
Menezes. “At the file level, RPs are
encrypted. At the user level, security
is provided with an optional
user-defined password. Should an
STL file reach the wrong hands, it
is useless without the password.
Best of all, there is no data loss due
to compression and encryption.
When you create an .RP file from
an .STL file and then convert it
back to a .STL file, you end up with
exactly the same .STL file.”
In another presentation, a curious
audience listened as Mills Davis
of Project 10x in Washington,
D.C., asked: “What if everything
we think we know about innovation
is wrong? For example, hot new products are supposedly the
thing,” he says. “But this is shortterm
thinking because hot ideas
are swiftly copied and commoditized.
Innovation is often thought
to come from being creative, but
it actually comes from being disciplined.
Likewise, innovation is
deemed expensive, but failure to
innovate is even more costly.”
Davis says to think of information
like a newspaper — it represents
the changing face of reality.
Knowledge, though, is something
learned and used daily. “A cultural
shift from information-centric
to knowledge-centric computing
would help foster innovation” he
says. “The Web is now the main
engine of global innovation. The
next iteration combines communication,
computing, and distributed
intelligence into what we call Web
3.0. This will soon let people and
machines connect, evolve, share,
and use knowledge on a grand scale
and in new ways, creating multibillion-
dollar markets for Web 3.0
products and services.”
Make contact
COFES, cofes.com
Cyon Research, cyonresearch.com
Karl Ulrich, opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~ulrich
OpenRP, openrp.com
Project 10x, project10x.com
Sycode, sycode.com