Product Innovation is getting attention..!!

Last week, I attended my 2^nd Product Innovation Conference (http://us.picongress.com/) in Chicago. This year’s conference focused more on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) than Product Innovation. Or, I should say it was portrayed as if having PLM is in itself sufficient for Product Innovation. This is of course not true. Product Innovation is about letting innovation come from any aspect of product development, whether it is customer feedback which forces you to think differently, supplier’s new IP driven part which would revolutionize product, design engineers working on completely different – never heard before – design  and feature set or an idea which sparked out during a conversation over coffee with friends. All this have no relation to whatsoever with PLM, except the fact that PLM can help manage, organize and track this information, once stored. The conference did have a few participants talking on Product Innovation. Overall the conference was a huge success with so many insights into Product Development across various industries that made me write about it.

Day 1 - The key note presentation was led by the Commissioner and CIO for City of Chicago, where she talked about collaboration between cities, counties and communities and how they rely on expertise developed by each other when there are limited resources (human and financial). She talked about future of technology and mayor’s vision to use data analytics, mobility and social platforms to take information closer to society. Very impressive indeed!

The presentation by SVP of ETAC AB where he talked about 12 advises on changing status of PLM from mere an IT function to Enterprise PLM. His insight as to why most of PLM projects overrun and are not successful is because PLM is perceived as IT project and not business transformation program and hence a lack of alignment between IT & business.

Pharmaceutical companies shared insights into their product development facts. It was interesting to note the amount of investment needed to bring a new product is over 1 billion and with over 90 % failure rate at stage 3 (which is one of test stages before FDA approval). The best part was the future perspective where medicines will be about personalization, based on our body structure and weight. The rest of Day 1 had sessions spread across industries ranging from process centric, to manufacturing to automotive to pharmaceutical and so on.

Day 2 - The key note presentation by the Director at New Harvest was an eye opener. She talked about cell cultured leather and cultured meat which will change the future about meat and leather. The cultured meat (beef) is created by extracting & harvesting naturally occurring stem cells from living cows and requires only 1% of the land, 4% of water, 50% of the energy than farmed meat.  She also gave an example of a company using plant extract as a substitute for egg for making mayonnaise, which made it vegan. The company instead of marketing at vegan / vegetarian mayonnaise is marketing as cholesterol free mayonnaise as it could target a larger market segment. Amazing!

There were also some new vendors at the conference who participating for the first time. Two of vendors caught my attention; the first was a software vendor on Engineering Knowledge Lifecycle Management which talked about preventing knowledge lost during product development and reusing it next time.  And the second vendor was on PLM Mobility demonstrating some of the apps built for Engineering and Retail, Footwear and Fashion and how they are being acknowledged and demanded by clients.

One thing that was missed at conference was lack of any case studies / presentation about Organization Change Management (OCM). OCM is mostly overlooked on any Product Development business transformation programs.

Well, I was conducting a think tank session on ‘Enterprise Mobility’. We defined “what is mobility” and proposed an initial maturity model. There was consensus that Mobility is not another jargon or fad but reality near term. Stay tuned for more on this.