All Features
Chip Bell
One of my favorite Halloween memories was decorating the annual giant pumpkin with my son when he was young. As a toddler, he was primarily an observer as he watched me sculpt the face of the pumpkin with a scrimp knife. However, his commitment to the pumpkin-carving process ramped up dramatically…
Mark Greevan
China’s dominance in manufacturing has made it the factory for the world. The subsequent economic growth enriched an ever-expanding middle class, and the country’s retail industry has quickly adapted to supply a growing appetite for consumption.
Some of these developments in the way people spend…
Angus Robertson, Ahmet Abaci, Beth Somplatsky-Martori
Often, there’s a razor-thin margin between success and failure. Not long ago, Gillette—which dominated the $3.5 billion market for razors and accessories for longer than a century—was challenged by a little upstart called Dollar Shave Club, which had just starred in its first commercial for a…
Rachel Gordon
First published Nov. 5, 2021, on MIT CSAIL News.
At just 1 year old, a baby is more dexterous than a robot. Sure, machines can do more than just pick up and put down objects, but we’re not quite there as far as replicating a natural pull toward exploratory or sophisticated dexterous manipulation…
Matt Fieldman
In September 2021, I was fortunate to attend the FABTECH conference in Chicago, a sprawling trade show with what must have been billions of dollars of manufacturing equipment on display: robots, automation, 3D printers, you name it. While there, I had the privilege of listening to a keynote address…
Julia Canale
Believe it or not, the technology that brought you Bitcoin is beginning to make waves in the food manufacturing industry. This technology, called blockchain, is a digital ledger maintained across several computers, then linked through a peer-to-peer network. The system's design makes it difficult…
John Colmers, Sherry Glied, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
The way the United States typically finances hospitals isn’t working. The coronavirus laid this bare, along with many other long-standing societal problems.
Before Covid-19, most hospitals were operating on a standard “fee-for-service”…
Christine Schaefer
When the City of Germantown, Tennessee, was named a Baldrige Award recipient in 2019, the small suburb of Memphis (just 20 square miles in size) became only the fourth city to earn the prestigious, presidential award for organizational excellence.
During the Baldrige program’s 32nd Quest for…
Alena Komaromi
Negotiators are often told they should eschew competitive negotiations, where parties fight for what’s on the table. They should instead increase the size of the pie and seek win-win scenarios. But in reality, competitive negotiations are often unavoidable. Sometimes, there doesn’t seem to be any…
Adam Zewe
In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced a simple chart to illustrate how measures like mask wearing and social distancing could “flatten the curve” and reduce the peak of infections.
The chart was amplified by news sites and shared on…
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Although laser-based 3D printing techniques have revolutionized the production of metal parts by greatly expanding design complexity, the laser beams traditionally used in metal printing have drawbacks that can lead to defects and poor mechanical performance.
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore…
Rob Lowe
Much like many industries, the manufacturing sector has been completely upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. However, unlike many sectors, manufacturing was already in the midst of a consistent cycle of up and downs by the time the Covid-19 pandemic struck.
From sourcing challenges to fighting off…
Zach Winn
More and more people are doing their shopping from home these days, and whether they’re ordering groceries, home office equipment, or Covid-19 tests, they increasingly expect their deliveries to be fast and on time.
Companies have struggled to keep up with the rise in orders and expectations. One…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
For most of 2021, roughly 4 percent of the retail workforce has quit every month; in June alone 632,000 workers quit their retail job. Even though retail workers are quitting at a record pace, more new stores are opening than expected and looking to hire new employees. So how can retail chains…
Karla Jo Helms
Disruptors are defined by several characteristics. They see beyond the existing status quo and challenge it by visualizing improvement and the outcome of that solution. Innovators do not provoke anger for its own sake, but they are not afraid to upset the competition or even potential allies. They…
Sachin Waikar
Know who invented the first digital camera? It was Kodak—or more accurately, an engineer at the historic camera company who conceived the technology and built a prototype in 1975. But corporate leadership had no interest in pursuing the idea, given the company’s dominant position in the market for…
Adam Zewe
MIT researchers have developed a new method to 3D print mechanisms that detect how force is being applied to an object. The structures are made from a single piece of material, so they can be rapidly prototyped. A designer could use this method to 3D print “interactive input devices,” like a…
Gleb Tsipursky
Fear of losing their innovative edge pushes many leaders to reject hybrid and virtual work arrangements. Yet extensive research shows that hybrid and remote teams can gain an innovation advantage and out-compete in-person teams by adopting best practices for innovation, such as virtual…
Kylie Foy
First published Oct. 4, 2021, on MIT News.
When it comes to games such as chess or Go, artificial intelligence (AI) programs have far surpassed the best players in the world. These “superhuman” AIs are unmatched competitors, but perhaps harder than competing against humans is collaborating with…
William A. Levinson
Luddism is, as depicted by Henry Ford, “...the theory that there is only so much work in the world to do and it must be strung out.”1 This dysfunctional paradigm is shared today by otherwise highly capable people such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, while former New York Mayor Bill…
Jason Maderer
New research from the Georgia Institute of Technology finds that elephants dilate their nostrils in order to create more space in their trunks, allowing them to store up to 5.5 liters of water. They can also suck up three liters per second—a speed 50 times faster than a human sneeze (150 meters per…
Felipe Monteiro
Bringing innovation inside an established firm, even one that has created novel ideas in the past, is not as simple as just purchasing bundled external knowledge and expecting it to work wonders at headquarters right away.
Enel CEO Francesco Starace’s mandate was to create long-term sustainable…
Matt Fieldman
This article is the sixth in a monthly series by the the America Works initiative. As a part of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) National Network’s goal of supporting the growth of small and medium-sized manufacturing companies, this series focuses on innovative approaches, and…
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
High-power laser pulses focused to small spots to reach incredible intensities enable a variety of applications, ranging from scientific research to industry and medicine. At the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center, for instance, intensity is key to building particle accelerators…
Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence
Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division, which supplies smart manufacturing technologies to giants from Volkswagen to Boeing, has unveiled HxGN Robotic Automation, pioneering robotic programming and control software that enables nonspecialist quality professionals to program industrial robots…