Innovation through Corporate and Academic Engagement

Measuring innovation ROI when corporations work with academia can sometimes be difficult. While one is driven to provide revenue generating results measured on a quarter to quarter basis, the other has goals of pedagogy and scholarship.

Here is an example of a success between Boeing and University of Washington on the 787:

"The key innovation that the UW center supported was a way to make “compression molded” parts from carbon fiber composites for small parts. The method was far cheaper than the regular process of layering long carbon fibers used for air frame components such as hull and wing."

Details here.

Why P&G Remains The CPG Leader

"“Instead of making the easy, wrong choice to scale back our investments, we’ve made the difficult, right choice to continue supporting our innovation and expansion programs as we get pricing and cost savings in place to offset higher commodity costs. We do view this as a short-term choice,” P&G Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller said in an Oct. 27 conference call."

Read the details here.

IBM: Chips to Think Like Humans

Few years back I decided to get into learning electronics hardware implementations as in SmartGrid and firmware applications. I believe that the convergence of soft, firm, and hard-wares is the future and understanding and leveraging this convergence will be key to success for companies that use technology for enablement.

Here is just such an example coming out of IBM, "IBM training computer chip to learn like a human", details here.

"Synapse was designed to learn through experience, find correlations, create hypotheses and remember outcomes. As chips such as Synapse become smarter and smaller, it will be possible to embed them in everyday objects. That portends a future in which the interaction between computer and user is far more natural and ubiquitous."