All Features

Michael Mills
From April 10 through July 3, 2025, ISO (International Organization for Standardization) had the opportunity to vote on a draft update to the global standard ISO 9000 “Quality management—Fundamentals and vocabulary.” ISO 9000 is the companion document to the more widely known ISO 9001. It contains…

Seb Murray
As more companies look to tools like ChatGPT to supercharge creativity, a new study out of Wharton offers a word of caution: Generative AI may boost individual performance, but it can also limit how teams think.
Research co-authored by Wharton professors Gideon Nave and Christian Terwiesch finds…

ISO
The digital revolution has transformed healthcare along with virtually every other industry. From telemedicine to digital health data, providers now have access to innovative solutions that have the potential to make healthcare more accessible and effective for all.
In some instances, this is done…

Zach Winn
Companies building next-generation products are often limited by the physical constraints of traditional materials. In aerospace, defense, energy, and industrial tooling, pushing those constraints introduces possible failure points into the system. Unfortunately, companies don’t have better options…

George Thuo
These are new times for manufacturers. Global pandemics. Worldwide supply-chain disruptions. Steep price increases for parts and materials. Increasingly competitive global markets.
Manufacturers are can-do people, but doing becomes harder in today’s “do more with less” manufacturing environment.…

Knowledge at Wharton
Many countries face the reality of demographic aging: Fertility is plummeting and people are living longer. This raises critical challenges for the labor market, healthcare, and long-term care markets, as well as retirement systems and financial planning. A Wharton symposium on the implications of…

Creaform
Brosius GmbH is a trusted partner in metal processing for a wide range of companies in the mechanical and plant engineering industries, offering comprehensive services under one roof. Brosius ensures that every part it manufactures in its 10,000 m² state-of-the-art production hall meets or exceeds…

Adam Zewe
Scientists are striving to discover new semiconductor materials that could boost the efficiency of solar cells and other electronics. But the pace of innovation is limited by the speed at which researchers can manually measure important material properties.
A fully autonomous robotic system…

Harish Jose
Readers of my blog might be aware that I appreciate the nuances of cybernetic constructivism. Cybernetic constructivism rejects the idea that we have access to an objective reality. It doesn’t deny that there’s an external reality independent of an observer. However, we don’t have direct access to…

Mark Hembree
The 2025 Major League Baseball season certainly started with a bang—at least for the New York Yankees. At Yankee Stadium against the Milwaukee Brewers, the Bronx Bombers blasted an MLB-record 15 home runs in the first three games, including nine homers in a 20-9 bludgeoning of the Brewers in the…

Cornelia C. Walther
When artificial intelligence burst into mainstream business consciousness, the narrative was compelling: Intelligent machines would handle routine tasks, freeing humans for higher-level creative and strategic work. McKinsey research sized the long-term AI opportunity at $4.4 trillion in added…
Quality Digest
(Boeing: El Segundo, CA) -- Boeing has successfully delivered its ninth and tenth O3b mPOWER satellites to content and network provider SES, advancing the company’s effort to provide global connectivity from space. The satellites, which feature Boeing’s fully software-defined payload technology to…

Zach Winn
Modern fighter jets contain hundreds or even thousands of sensors. Some of those sensors collect data every second, others every nanosecond. For the engineering teams building and testing those jets, all those data points are hugely valuable—if they can make sense of them.
Nominal is an advanced…

Amy Knue
Health systems across the country are unknowingly paying multiple times for the same medical equipment—once to own it, and again to rent it. The issue isn’t always an increase in clinical demand; it’s often availability and visibility to medical device inventory. The cost of these unnecessary…

Christa Kuljian
Seven women were part of a trailblazing network of feminist scientists in the Boston area during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Christa Kuljian is a science writer and historian of science who focuses much of her research on issues of science and society, gender, and race. She’s the author of two…

ISO
Gridlocked streets, honking horns, and polluted air—modern city life often feels like a daily battle against time and space. With half the world’s population projected to live in cities by 2050, the pressure on transport systems is reaching a breaking point. Long commutes steal hours from our day,…

Michael McDowell
As artificial intelligence takes off, how do we efficiently integrate it into our lives and our work? Bridging the gap between promise and practice, Jann Spiess, an associate professor of operations, information, and technology at Stanford Graduate School of Business, explores how algorithms can be…

Stephanie Ojeda
Spreadsheets are usually the first tool used to manage suppliers, and the first to become a liability. Important updates get buried. Repeat supplier problems start popping up. Along the way, you start to wonder whether that cheaper vendor is really saving you money in the long run.
The core…

Annie Wilson
More than half of the nation’s 623,218 bridges are showing significant deterioration. Through an in-field case study conducted in western Massachusetts, a team led by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst—in collaboration with researchers from the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (…

Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Stronger than steel and lighter than aluminum, carbon fiber is a staple in aerospace and high-performance vehicles. Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have found a way to make it even stronger.
ORNL researchers simulated 5 million atoms to study a …

Sanath Hegde
For quality heads, compliance officers, auditors, and engineering leaders, audits have been a time-consuming, resource-intensive process, yet necessary to build resilient operations, prevent costly failures, and maintain competitive advantage.
The question isn’t whether to audit, but how to…

Harish Jose
In this article I’m exploring the need for ethics in systems thinking using the ideas of Heinz von Foerster and Russell Ackoff. The two come from different traditions within systems thinking. Von Foerster comes from physics and second-order cybernetics, and Ackoff from operations research and…

Adam Zewe
The advanced semiconductor material gallium nitride (GaN) will likely be key for the next generation of high-speed communication systems and the power electronics needed for state-of-the-art data centers.
Unfortunately, the high cost of GaN and the specialization required to incorporate this…

Creaform
Streamlining the transition from scan-to-CAD involves selecting the right tool set for reverse engineering. However, many software platforms force product designers to switch between multiple tools, disrupting their workflow and increasing the risk of errors. Furthermore, some advanced scan-to-CAD…

Christoph Dorigatti
When Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line in 1913, manufacturing changed forever. Today, it stands on the edge of another revolution—one powered by AI, automation, and sustainability. Ford’s innovation paved the way for transformation. Those who embrace the future now will define…