All Features
Robert Zaruda
Northwest Industrial Resource Center (NWIRC), one of the centers that make up the Pennsylvania Manufacturing Extension Partnership, is helping launch student-run enterprises throughout northwest and north-central Pennsylvania. These enterprises connect industry with high schools and career and…
Maria Guadalupe, Bryan Ng
Soft skills, the behavioral and social traits that enable individuals to work harmoniously with one another, aren’t just nice to have. They’re essential for the growth of a nation.
In France, 60 percent of employers consider soft skills, such as the ability to organize, adapt, and work in teams,…
Gleb Tsipursky
Imagine you put on an old coat you haven’t worn in a while, and to your surprise you find a crumpled $20 bill in your pocket. How good does it feel? Do you go up half of a notch on a 1–10 mood scale—or maybe a full notch?
Let’s imagine a different scenario. Your grandmother calls to say she hopes…
Christopher Dancy
Despite the important and ever-increasing role of artificial intelligence in many parts of modern society, there is very little policy or regulation governing the development and use of AI systems in the United States. Tech companies have largely been left to regulate themselves in this arena,…
Jake Mazulewicz
A technician spills a toxic chemical. She isn’t injured but easily could have been. The hazmat cleanup costs more than $10,000 and shuts down a critical building for a week.
An electrical engineer flips the wrong switch in a substation control room. He isn’t injured. But within seconds, a $50,000…
Scott Ginsberg
Twenty years ago, digital tools were “a thing.” Now they flow through all things.
To some degree, every manufacturer is now a digital company. And with the right modern platform, any manufacturing organization can break down silos of ownership to focus on the intersection of people, processes, and…
Donna McGeorge
The world of work will always revolve around people working with people. Meeting together is an important way to get things done, which is why meetings will always be a part of organizational life. But they’re also hated by most people—not because they get things done (which they do), but because…
Alaina Love
Miles had just been promoted to his first position at the director level after two short years of working for a large manufacturer in a complicated, heavily regulated industry. What surprised him most about the culture of the company is how project-oriented the firm had become during his tenure as…
Henrik Hulgaard
The phrase “supply chain” became part of the everyday vernacular during the pandemic, as supply chain issues seemed to affect everyone's life—from toilet paper to automotive components. Supply chain problems are well known to cause disruptions with product delivery, particularly in the complicated…
Laurie Guest
Everyone’s heard of it by now: “Quiet quitting” is the freshly coined phrase to describe the age-old behavior of not quite leaving one’s job entirely but rather opting to no longer go above and beyond. It’s service fatigue to the extreme, risking not just customer satisfaction but also staff…
Adam Zewe
Ask a smart home device for the weather forecast, and it takes several seconds to respond. One reason for this latency is that connected devices don’t have enough memory or power to store and run the enormous machine-learning models needed for the device to understand what a user is asking of it.…
Adriana Lynch
The decade of the 2020s has given businesses—and the consumers who count on them—quite a ride. Neither tea leaves nor the best efforts of analysts could have predicted the impact that the one-two punch of a pandemic and roller-coaster economy would have on both markets and marketplaces.
Consumers…
Zach Winn
When it comes to battery innovations, much attention gets paid to potential new chemistries and materials. Often overlooked is the importance of production processes for bringing down costs.
Now the MIT spinout 24M Technologies has simplified lithium-ion battery production with a new design that…
Mike Figliuolo
One of the most awkward situations you can encounter in business is when someone goes from being a peer to being the boss. If you do a few things well, you can make the transition smoothly.
Life is full of awkward moments: the first kiss, an interview candidate having spinach stuck in their teeth…
NIST
An improvement to a Nobel Prize-winning technology called a frequency comb enables it to measure light pulse arrival times with greater sensitivity than previously possible—potentially improving measurements of distance along with applications such as precision timing and atmospheric sensing.
The…
Stephen Bevan
The UK was supposed to be facing a spike in unemployment after the pandemic furlough schemes ended. But instead the job market is the tightest in a generation. Given that there are also more vacancies than active job seekers, and many sectors are struggling with skill shortages, you might expect to…
Anne Trafton
Taking advantage of a phenomenon known as emergent behavior in the microscale, MIT engineers have designed simple microparticles that can collectively generate complex behavior, much the same way that a colony of ants can dig tunnels or collect food.
Working together, the microparticles can…
Megean Blum, Nico Thomas
When Nico asked me if I wanted to collaborate on this year’s challenges blog, my second thought after agreeing to the idea was a scene from the 2007 film Music and Lyrics, which I likely haven’t seen since approximately 2008.
Why this popped into my head is unknown, but ha—pop! I had forgotten…
Bruno Ménard
While traditional image processing software relies on task-specific algorithms, deep learning software uses a network to implement user-trained algorithms to recognize good and bad images or regions.
Fortunately, the advent of specialized algorithms and graphical user interface (GUI) tools for…
Erika James
Patagonia, the sportswear brand, made headlines this summer when its founder and CEO, Yvon Chouinard, announced his intention to effectively give away the multibillion dollar business instead of selling it.
Chouinard, a famously “reluctant” entrepreneur, detailed his decision to an astonished…
Bryan Christiansen
Assets are resources owned and used by a company to generate a positive economic benefit. Assets can be physical items, like equipment or furniture, or they can be intangibles like software, patents, or documents.
As a business owner, it’s important to know which assets you own, their location,…
Leeza Garber, Allison Jegla
In late spring 2022, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged an elite investment adviser for “misstatements and omissions” about environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations related to its managed mutual funds. This same financial firm has also faced myriad…
jeffdewar
This is the final installment of a five-part series.
We’ve considered two quality organizations. The first, ASQ, has been around since 1946. Founded by none other than W. Edwards Deming, Joseph M. Juran, Walter A. Shewhart, and George D. Edwards. Titans of the quality field. Visionaries before they…
S. Heather Duncan
A new deep-learning framework developed at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is speeding up the process of inspecting additively manufactured metal parts using X-ray computed tomography, or CT, while increasing the accuracy of the results. The reduced costs for time, labor,…
William A. Levinson
‘You see, but you do not observe,” Sherlock Holmes told Dr. Watson in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1891) A Scandal in Bohemia. Taiichi Ohno, who developed Henry Ford’s lean production system into the Toyota Production System, told managers to stand in a circle on the shop floor and observe everything…
