Innovation CHEF

The ability to realise a design, to hold it in your hand and look it over is a source of great satisfaction to any product designer. The advent of 3D rapid prototyping systems brought design up from the drawing board (or monitor) and into the physical world. These prototypes were often nice to look at but far from robust.

A new wave of technology is showcased in the recent IFTF publication and describes a future world of instant and embedded technology and huge implications for manufacturing. While not quite at the sophistication of those on Star Trek it still is going to be a huge change in short run manufacturing.

Many companies use rapid protoyping in their design processes. This prototyping has had a significant impact on product design. Designers and engineers can identify problems early in the design cycle. Marketing and human factors can test for market acceptability and usability. The designer can easily be on a different continent from the marketeer or the production engineer who can download the design to their local fabrication tool and have a part in a few hours.

This form of prototyping is can now be seen to transform into rapid, high-end manufacturing. The downloadable product is well on it’s way. As YouTube allowed anyone to be a broadcaster – platforms will spring up to allow anyone to be a manufacturer. Mass customisation is throttled by the fixed dimensions of moulds and tooling – remove that constraint and the advent of YouBarbie arrives.

This has already been seen in the transformation in the print world. You can write, photograph photoshop, and print anything – including your own professional magazine out from the internet.

Check out the PDF. There is a lot of thought provoking stuff from the Institutes researchers and commentary from the SciFi writer Bruce Sterling.

Though there may be a downside too.

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This is a fun video to watch..but is it the wrong image of invention?

Wouldn’t normally be the kind of thing we’d recommend. Innovation is more of an everyday habit of excellence rather than some esoteric or mysterious thing for the gurus and Einsteins. We’ll not suck the fun out of it but this entry for Cadbury’s “Unleash The Goo” competition, in which entrants must find the most creative way to break a Creme Egg shows a lot of great behaviours to be totally supported.

This shows:

• Dedication
• Understanding of physics
• Use of free and available resources
• Teamwork
• Prototyping
• success

Two posts in a row on Goo?
Is there a 41st principle of innovation here?

Enjoy:

In January the founder of one of Europes leading Innovation Consultancy firms was interviewed on the CNBC show “The Business of  Innovation” In the interview Tim Jones talked about where he felt Ireland should focus it’s innovation efforts. The areas of nutraceuticals and nutrigenomics were highlighted as areas from which Ireland could build on core competencies with the food/drink industry.

Here is a clip.