All Features
Ryan E. Day
Innovation within industry is a must to improve processes, products, and customer experience. Although some innovations, like Amazon’s floating distribution center, seem implausible, other sci-fi technology is already revolutionizing and redefining the way employees accomplish tasks.
Tales of…
Jason Maderer
Researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University have created a device that makes walking up and down stairs easier. They’ve built energy-recycling stairs that store a user’s energy during descent and return energy to the user during ascent.
The spring-loaded stairs compress when someone comes…
Greg Anderson
The Affordable Care Act created the CMS Innovation Center to allow Medicare and Medicaid programs to test innovative payment and delivery models that improve patient care and lower healthcare costs.
The Innovation Center organizes models into seven categories. Some models are based on payment…
Bruce Weinberg
Science funding is intended to support the production of new knowledge and ideas that develop new technologies, improve medical treatments, and strengthen the economy. The idea goes back to influential engineer Vannevar Bush, who headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
I recall, back in 1995, trying to decide whether to get an internet account. I only knew two or three people who had them. Email sounded like a cool idea, but you still needed to pick up the phone to get in touch with someone. (Remember when the question was, “Do you have an email address?”…
Jeffrey Phillips
I have just returned from a trip to Dubai to speak at an innovation conference there. This is my third trip to Dubai, and I always come away consistently amazed at what the people and the government are doing. When I return to the States, people ask me what Dubai is like. I joking tell them that I…
Shaun Wissner
Sponsored Content
Connectivity has changed the world we live in. While today it is a trend, the true potential of connectivity lies in the future. As manufacturers begin to investigate how they can integrate this developing technology, they rely on solutions from organizations, like Hexagon…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
There is no shortage of weirdness in quantum mechanics, and the phenomenon known as entanglement is weird with a capital “W.” When two particles are entangled, they share a connection no matter how far the distance between them.
Measuring one particle can tell you what measuring the other…
Scott Gottlieb
It is incumbent upon the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure that we have the right policies in place to promote and encourage safe and effective innovation that can benefit consumers, and adopt regulatory approaches to enable the efficient development of these technologies. By…
Jason Furness
Following on from yesterday’s column (which can view here), we explore the right-hand side of the diagram below and see the outlook you can adopt that is the most productive for you personally. Transitioning the thought processes of your team to this ideal quadrant is a necessary and highly…
Mike Richman
The July 17, 2017, episode of QDL focused on some of the nitty-gritty of quality improvement, from the value of personal certifications to the opportunities of disruptive innovation, and to the fundamentals of risk management to the challenges of customer service. In case you missed it, here’s a…
Georgia Tech News Center
A marimba-playing robot with four arms and eight sticks is writing and playing its own compositions in a lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The pieces are generated using artificial intelligence and deep learning.
Researchers fed the robot nearly 5,000 complete songs—from Beethoven to…
Pat Toth
Recently a segment on my favorite morning news program stopped me in my tracks. The young and attractive hosts (why are they always so young and attractive?) were demonstrating new appliances, among them a smart refrigerator. The fridge was equipped with all kinds of high-tech features including…
Michael O’Shea
Sponsored Content
Opportunities are becoming more frequent to apply metrology to adaptive robot control for many applications. There are many different techniques to accomplish this, from regular calibration to real-time feedback, using anything from laser trackers to optical devices in order to…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
More than 2,000 years ago a huge ship crashed beneath the cliffs of Antikythera, a small island off the coast of Greece. Later discovered in 1900, the wreck yielded a trove of antiquities, including an amazing geared mechanism that, just for starters, predicted eclipses and the location of the sun…
MIT Sloan School of Management
There are few executives today who don’t wish they could be more productive. Even the most successful individuals are looking for new and better ways to get more accomplished while maintaining or increasing their quality of life.
“Regardless of location, industry, or occupation, productivity is a…
Ian Haydon
There’s a revolution happening in biology, and its name is CRISPR. CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”) is a powerful technique for editing DNA. It has received an enormous amount of attention in the scientific and popular press, largely based on the promise of what this powerful gene-editing technology…
Mike Richman
If there was one key takeaway from Hexagon’s impressive and impressively large user conference, styled “HxGN Live,” which took place earlier this month, it’s that finding actionable information, not merely acquiring mountains of data, is the key to developing a truly smart factory. “It’s always…
Erin Connelly
For a long time, medieval medicine has been dismissed as irrelevant. This time period is popularly referred to as the “Dark Ages,” which erroneously suggests that it was unenlightened by science or reason. However, some medievalists and scientists are now looking back to history for clues to…
NETL
Contrary to that old cooking adage, “a watched pot never boils,” keeping a careful eye on things—in the kitchen or in the laboratory—can be essential to making a useable (or edible) final product.
Take chocolate, for instance, that foundational block of the food pyramid. An important part of…
Liri Andersson
Ten years ago, when we would ask senior executives or company directors what “digital” meant to them, their response would usually be something related to social media. Today, it might be apps, big data, 3D printing, the cloud, or another current example of digital technology. All such answers are…
Christopher Martin
Many of us are familiar with the concept of the Ohno Circle, innovated by Taiichi Ohno at Toyota during the 1940s. While familiarity with the technique and the goals it sets to accomplish is one thing, how many of us have actually participated? The surprising answer is… probably all of us, in a…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
Building airplanes and spaceships poses some of the most unique engineering and manufacturing challenges mankind has ever encountered. Fortunately, you don’t have to build rockets to benefit from rocket science. Manufacturers of most any product can improve their efficiency and…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
You can be known as a hard worker and counted on to tie up loose ends, but fall behind when co-workers’ tasks are on hold until yours are complete, and you’re perceived as needing an attitude adjustment. What would you want to do? Place blame or work on a remedy? There is a solution: Personal…
Barbara A. Cleary
In a 1995 interview, tech guru Steve Jobs posited that empires could crash and burn if the emphasis is on sales rather than on product. “Companies forget what it means to make great products,” he said. Instead, they direct resources to selling, rather than improving and innovating.
If empires can…
