All Features
Christopher Martin
In 1996, former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington formed Washington-based video-game development studio Valve Corp. Two years later, they released a PC game called Half-Life to universal critical acclaim; it was a watershed moment in gaming history, and nearly 20 years later the…
Nick Butch
One of my favorite things about being a condensed matter physicist is how broadly defined the subject is. There are lots of interesting phenomena begging for scientific attention, so it’s never boring. One of my favorite topics lies at the crossroads of magnetism and superconductivity.
Magnets…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In last week’s Quality Digest Live: design digital assistance instead of digital assistants, how to make better beer, and closed-loop manufacturing.
“How Digital Media Will Bring Out Our Best Selves in the Workplace”
To improve the workplace, maybe we need a fewer digital assistants and lot more…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
Traffic crawled. Ahead of me was a pickup, its bumper thick with stickers. From the one most cracked and faded, I saw the word “welfare.” Just before the driver switched lanes, I made out the rest: “Work harder—there are millions on welfare depending on you.” That triggered a memory so vivid I no…
Jeffrey Phillips
Ihave been thinking a lot about the challenges that midsized and larger companies face when trying to do more innovation. It’s not a secret that they need to do more innovation; everyone knows this. It’s not really a secret what innovation is, or what the potential benefits might look like. We’ve…
Chip Bell
Imagine a hotel proposing that the housekeeper put a goldfish in your guest room in a basketball-sized bowl filled with colorful rocks. All they ask is that you give it a name so you can have “your” fish join you again on your next stay. Visualize the bathrobe in the closet being zebra-striped or…
Nikolaus Correll
America’s manufacturing heyday is gone, and so are millions of jobs, lost to modernization. Despite what Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin might think, the National Bureau of Economic Research and Silicon Valley executives, among others, know this is true. A new report from PwC estimates that 38…
Morten Bennedsen
Employee absenteeism is a problem for companies everywhere. When employees are away from the office, for good reasons or not, the cost has been measured at somewhere around 4 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. Absences lead to delayed work, colleagues take on more, and projects are…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
For manufacturers, big parts pose big challenges. How does one measure parts that are in excess of 15 ft and also have complex geometry? Design and inspection are part and parcel of all manufacturing operations, but as product size increases, and part geometry grows more complex…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
One of the biggest drivers for innovation is scarcity—of resources, time, even knowledge. Necessity and scarcity drive you to look at your approach differently than when you are surrounded by abundance. Forced to use different methods and tools, you improvise, you MacGyver, and the result is often…
Dawn Bailey
The message for audience members who attended the 29th Annual Quest for Excellence Conference held last week was, “Prepare for an inspiring journey.” This was the advice of keynote presenter Polly LaBarre, co-founder and director of Management Lab (MLab) and co-founder of Management Innovation…
Janet Forgrieve
Restaurant reservations systems such as OpenTable and Yelp Reservations may be one of the biggest areas where technology is working to help restaurants win new customers and build a bigger roster of loyal regulars. The services offer tools that help eateries customize the experience and add a…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
Recently I was contacted by a reader asking me if I would suggest some exercises that he could use to think more creatively. That request has inspired me to write about some fun ways that you, too, can exercise your creative mind.
The purpose of these exercises is to condition your mind to…
Catherine Anderson et al.
A well-designed product equally elevates form and function. It is pleasing to look at, easy to use, and solves a common problem. Here, five design professors answer the following question: What’s the best-designed product of all time, and why? Their responses vary from cheap, everyday products to…
Mike Richman
For as long as humans have been humans (and for perhaps a million years before then, give or take), we’ve been tool users and toolmakers. Short of the occasional Ned Ludd supporter, most of us enthusiastically adopt new technologies to make our lives easier, more productive, or just more fun.…
Henrik Werdelin
In a startup’s early days, innovation is the name of the game. But once companies gain size and recognition, they go into maintenance mode, unwilling to let new approaches take hold. When the CEOs of these larger corporations do seek innovation or change, they expect a seamless execution.
Here’s…
Lars Fæste, Jim Hemerling
Digital disruption is reaching beyond technology to engulf a variety of industries, including manufacturing, transportation, energy, healthcare, and construction, that constitute a significant portion of the global economy. Manufacturing alone accounts for 12 percent of the U.S. GDP, according to…
Mike Richman
The March 24 episode of QDL offered a potpourri of topics, including news and features from the realms of academia, corporate culture, and politics. Here’s a quick recap:
“Winners Selected for the 2017 InVenture Prize” Colloquially known as “American Idol for Nerds,” the InVenture Prize offered by…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
There are a lot of good quality tools and improvement processes out there for when you are not engaged and productivity wanes. But until you find the root cause of your behavior, any improvement won’t be sustained.
I read about the three modalities of awakened doing in Eckhart Tolle’s book, A New…
MIT News
Although data scientists can gain great insights from large data sets—and can ultimately use these insights to tackle major challenges—accomplishing this is much easier said than done. Many such efforts are stymied from the outset, as privacy concerns make it difficult for scientists to access the…
NIST
Providing wireless communications in a factory, plant, or other industrial environment these days means more than just helping employees talk with each other while they work. By eliminating physical connections such as wires and cables from a facility’s communication network, wireless technology…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
‘Made in the U.S.A.” Do people really care about those words on the label, and more important, how motivated are they to buy American-made products? The answer is yes... and sort of. Yes, consumers in the United States say they want to “buy American” and are willing to pay up for it. According to…
Tom Scaletta
Quality improvement initiatives are a mainstay for hospital care teams. They can also offer a fresh approach for raising patient satisfaction scores. To achieve maximum effectiveness, however, they require timely patient feedback.
Nowhere is this truer, perhaps, than in the high-volume/short-…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Before my bosses get wind of the artificial intelligence (AI) platform Quill (“perfectly written, meaningful narratives indistinguishable from a human-written one”) and decide its 18-month ROI would be a great exchange for my pay and complaining, I’d like to present this human-centric survey of…
Jeffrey Phillips
The attempt to eliminate noise from an operating system or a business process is an interesting and perhaps worthwhile challenge, until one considers the question: What is the real signal? What is creating the noise?
In many businesses today, there are several signals, what we might call noise…
