All Features
Alison Hawke
Historically, quality in a process was something that was done at the end of the line. You inspected your widget once it was made, and if it had flaws, you fixed it or threw it out.
As in many modern manufacturing environments, quality in software has become a process you do from start to finish.…
Mike Richman
IMTS was a blast, but it was great to be back home in lovely Northern California this week. On this episode of QDL, we covered the skills that workers need and the innovations that organizations want. Plus, we brought you a live interview with author Mark Graban, and one on tape from Burt Mason of…
Gary Marchionini
As millions of people came online iduring the late 1990s, they needed help figuring out what each web page was about, and how to find what they were looking for. Web indexes and search engines sprang up. When Google was founded in September 1998, it had to compete with the information retrieval…
Knowledge at Wharton
‘How is it that in the middle of a relatively small town of about 125,000 people in Minnesota, you’ve got the No. 1-rated healthcare system probably in the world?”
The question was put to Jeffrey Bolton—the Mayo Clinic’s chief administrative officer—by Larry Jameson, executive vice president of…
Mike Richman
With more than 110,000 expected attendees, IMTS is Chicago’s hottest suburb this week. (I like to refer to it as “Manufactureville.”) Here’s what we covered during our second show of the week, from the booth of today’s sponsor, Q-Mark Manufacturing:
“Tapping Your Employee’s Knowledge”
It’s no…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
We arrived in Chicago over the weekend to luxuriously appointed accommodations and much fanfare (that’s how it is when you’re the cast and crew of the No. 1 talk show in the quality industry). In our first episodes of Quality Digest Live from the floor of IMTS 2018, we were truly given the red-…
Mike Richman
IMTS is almost here, so we previewed the show, considered an important industry-academia partnership within manufacturing, and asked serious questions about the nature of motivation. Let’s take a look:
IMTS Preview
Dirk, I, and much of the Quality Digest Live crew will be in Chicago next week for…
Mike Richman
If you want to keep stretching and improving, you’d better get comfortable with the discomfort of change. People have been saying that for decades, yet each time we successfully adjust to new business developments—or personal developments, for that matter—what’s the first thing we tend to want to…
Joseph Blasi, Douglas Kruse
T
he federal government just made it a lot easier to form an employee-owned business.
Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), created in 1956, by the late political economist Louis O. Kelso, are currently the most common way to do this because it gives regular workers a way to buy companies, and…
Rob Matheson
A novel encryption method devised by MIT researchers secures data used in online neural networks, without dramatically slowing their runtimes. This approach holds promise for using cloud-based neural networks for medical-image analysis and other applications that use sensitive data.
Outsourcing…
Sam Golan
Technological innovations on all fronts are evolving quickly and are developed, manufactured, and sold worldwide in aerospace, medical device, communications, automotive, and many other industry segments. It’s hard to keep up with these breakthroughs because they are growing exponentially. But…
Steven Brand
Virtual reality (VR), sometimes referred to as augmented reality (AR), is shaking things up across all industries, including manufacturing. Although the technology is currently being employed mainly by large manufacturers, like additive manufacturing and the cobots before it, growing acceptance of…
Rob Matheson
MIT researchers have developed novel photography optics that capture images based on the timing of reflecting light inside the optics, instead of the traditional approach that relies on the arrangement of optical components. These new principles, the researchers say, open doors to new capabilities…
Richard Wilkinson
Whether it’s the effort to redefine the kilogram or researching the Harry Potter realm of quantum mechanics where things can somehow be in two or more places at one time, quite a bit of the science carried out at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) can be hard for the average…
Katie Takacs
As a consumer, it’s nearly impossible to get away from videos, advertising or otherwise. To give you a numeric sense of our collective obsession with online moving images: Since last year, YouTube has started registering more than a billion hours of video viewing every single day.
We all know the…
Kumar Mehta
Establishing the conditions that encourage innovation is the best way for your company to develop an environment that lets you produce offerings with new and novel value—innovations in the eyes of your users. The most innovative companies do this instinctively—perhaps because of the culture…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
Does this sound familiar? The keynote speaker is talking a mile a minute as you scramble to take notes on her every word. Your hand cramps, and then it’s over. Speaker bows to a standing ovation while you sit perturbed, knowing you missed some things. But angst arrives as you look over your notes…
Caroline Preston
Editor’s note: This story is part of Map to the Middle Class, a Hechinger Report series looking at the good middle-class jobs of the future and how schools are preparing young people for them.
The program had to be a scam. Why would anyone, she wondered, pay her to go to college?
Even after Sarat…
Hélène Horent
Founded in 1947, in Veles, Macedonia, BRAKO produces parts and components used in medical devices, road sweeper trucks, airport ground equipment, forklift accessories, metal-welded constructions, small hydro plants, telecommunications shelters, and antenna towers.
The company also makes various…
Morgan Ryan Frank, Iyad Rahwan
How do workers move up the corporate ladder, and how can they maximize their career mobility? Increased wealth disparity, increased job polarization, and decreases in absolute income mobility (i.e., the fraction of children who earn more than their parents) all suggest that upward mobility is…
Kaya Wiles
Your everyday permanent markers, glue sticks, and packing tape may offer a surprisingly low-tech solution to a long-standing nuisance in the manufacturing industry: Making soft and ductile, or so-called “gummy” metals easier to cut.
What makes inks and adhesives effective isn’t their chemical…
Mark Miller, Lucas Conley
Recently, General Electric—the last remaining member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s original 1896 index—was removed from the world’s most prestigious equity benchmark. News of the venerable brand’s dismissal from the Dow, the index of 30 large, publicly traded U.S. brands reflecting the…
Quy Huy
Innovation is the No. 1 priority of today’s CEOs. They correctly perceive that the fast-turning treadmill of disruption topples organizations that stand still. The only sure-fire way to stay on top is to consistently introduce products and services that provide unique, superior value and defy…
Leonard L. Berry, D. Kirk Hamilton
We spend much of our time in buildings, and they can have a profound effect on our well-being, for better or for worse. As long ago as 1943, Winston Churchill told Britain’s House of Commons that “we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
Research is showing that effective…
Jeffrey Phillips
Ihave been thinking a lot lately about innovation and how we may have emphasized one component at the expense of another. Here I’m talking about something that should appear obvious—the focus of innovation in building new things. We are constantly reminded that innovation is about building new…
