All Features
Dawn Bailey
In 2020, MESA, a small business in Oklahoma, became to date the first and only three-time Baldrige Award recipient.
From a one-person consulting firm founded in 1979, MESA has grown to support a workforce of more than 250 people. The largest privately owned company in its market, it is a…
Anne Trafton
First published June 7, 2021, on MIT News.
MIT engineers have discovered a new way of generating electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create a current simply by interacting with liquid surrounding them.
The liquid, an organic solvent, draws electrons out of the particles, generating a…
Harry Hertz
Each year after the Quest for Excellence Conference, I sift through my notes and try to identify themes I have heard in the presentations of the new Baldrige Award recipients. The most recent summary was after the 2019 conference (the 2021 conference included recipients from the last two years).…
Adam J. Fleisher
In an essay titled “The end of artefacts,” Nobel laureate and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) fellow William D. Phillips details how scientists came to realize the original vision of the metric system, or the International System of Units (SI)—a system of units “for all times…
Chip Bell
We live in an era of statue removal. Meanwhile the largest mountain carving in the world is under construction in the Black Hills of South Dakota just 17 miles from Mount Rushmore. The final carving will be 640 feet long and more than 50 stories high. The subject of that carving? Crazy Horse.…
Caroline Zimmerman
With big data and artificial intelligence (AI) transforming business, it’s almost certain that every executive will need to leverage these technologies at some point to advance their organization—and their career. However, doing so carries a heavy intimidation factor for most leaders, and this is…
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Plastics are a part of nearly every product we use on a daily basis. The average person in the United States generates about 100 kg of plastic waste per year, most of which goes straight to a landfill. A team led by Corinne Scown, Brett Helms, Jay Keasling, and Kristin Persson at Lawrence Berkeley…
Benjamin Kessler
Suddenly, supply chains are in the spotlight. The practical details of how products arrive on supermarket shelves, for example, gained unwelcome relevance amid last year’s wave of panic buying caused by Covid-19 disruption. At the same time, the environmental damage wrought by wasteful industrial…
James Wells
I was talking recently with a friend who runs an academic program at a major U.S. university. She was telling me about solving a problem in her department and how the solution was obvious so she just did it. She then related how one of her colleagues protested that she should have used some Six…
Eric Brown
This story was originally published by MIT News.
Blade Kotelly is a senior lecturer at MIT on design thinking, user interfaces, and innovation. His enthusiasm for cars is intertwined with his passion for innovative design. But despite Kotelly’s love affair with the internal combustion engine, he…
Enterprise Minnesota
Based in Winona, Minnesota, Alliant Castings is a foundry manufacturing abrasion and impact-resistant castings for a variety of heavy-duty industries. Utilizing the latest technologies, they create custom, proprietary materials to meet their clients' needs for demanding and extreme performance. In…
Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
Working from home—formally known as telework—is here to stay. A 2021 survey of approximately 30,000 Americans concluded that, after the pandemic, 20 percent of all work days may continue to take place at home, vs. just 5 percent before.…
Judah Levine
Frequency was originally considered to be the province of musicians. The pitches or frequencies of the notes in a musical scale are defined by ratios—octaves, for example, where the frequency of the higher note is twice the frequency of the lower one.
The 12 notes between octaves in Western music…
Ryan E. Day
Just like its predecessors, this fourth industrial revolution (dubbed Industry 4.0 in 2011) is all about increasing productivity. Unlike the first three revolutions, today’s pivotal technologies hold forth the possibility to also improve efficiency, quality, and human satisfaction.
Steam power,…
Knowledge at Wharton
Technology firms are the drivers of disruption across industries, but things will play out differently for automobiles, according to John Paul MacDuffie, Wharton management professor and director of the school’s Program on Vehicle and Mobility Innovation.
Tomorrow’s vehicles will be built with…
Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick
The civil rights movement and Moore’s Law are colliding to transform politics. On the street, smartphone technology is being used to document social life as never before, putting power into the hands of the public and making eyewitnesses of us all.
This same technology, bolted onto cheap and easy-…
Chip Bell
Iam often asked by customer service leaders how to get the CEO to care about customers. They are convinced there is a missed tactic that, if implemented, would have the C-suite camping out in the contact center and inviting customers to board meetings. When I outline a number of possible approaches…
Judah Levine
As a physicist in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Time and Frequency Division, I have worked in the general area of operating atomic clocks and using output signals from them to distribute time and frequency information for more than 40 years. I am also a Fellow at JILA,…
Jo Napolitano
Artificial intelligence, or AI, requires a huge amount of computing power and versatile hardware to support that power. But most AI-supportive hardware is built around the same decades-old technology, and still a long way from emulating the neural activity in the human brain.
In an effort to solve…
Knowledge at Wharton
The future of work is hybrid. In the post-pandemic world, many companies will embrace the lessons learned from more than a year of telecommuting and not fully return to the office. Instead, Wharton management professor Martine Haas says, they will adopt a hybrid model with some combination of…
Eryn Brown, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
Last spring, things looked grim for Dora Herrera. Revenues at her family’s 45-year-old restaurant business, Yuca’s, had plummeted within a few short weeks as Covid-19 kept customers away from its two popular taco shacks in Los Angeles and…
John Toon
Using X-ray tomography, a research team has observed the internal evolution of the materials inside solid-state lithium batteries as they were charged and discharged. Detailed 3D information from the research could help improve the reliability and performance of the batteries, which use solid…
Sharona Hoffman
Artificial intelligence holds great promise for improving human health by helping doctors make accurate diagnoses and treatment decisions. It can also lead to discrimination that can harm minorities, women, and economically disadvantaged people.
The question is, when healthcare algorithms…
Matt Fieldman
What is America Works, and why is it important to the future of American manufacturing?
The American manufacturing industry is at a crossroads, facing growing competition from foreign countries while struggling to develop a skilled, dedicated workforce here at home. American manufacturers are…
Ryan E. Day
One of the technologies driving Industry 4.0 is artificial intelligence (AI), and AI is enabling massive change in manufacturing. It is also revolutionizing the smart manufacturing supply chain as well.
It seems that for every benefit technology provides, it also spawns an associated challenge.…
