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In 1978, inventor Thomas Jake Lunsford patented a new form of plastic packaging and unknowingly triggered the ire of hundreds of millions of consumers.
His invention was the “clamshell”—a type of packaging that envelops a product in two form-fitting, sealed plastic shells. The public frustration…
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…
(Wayland Additive: Huddersfield, UK) -- Wayland Additive will be exhibiting its original and highly effective metal additive manufacturing (AM) system, Calibur3, featuring the NeuBeam process, at Formnext 2021 taking place in Frankfurt, Germany Nov. 16–19, 2021. A key feature that attendees will…
(Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence: North Kingstown, RI) -- Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division has announced the new structure and growth plans for computer-aided engineering (CAE) at its first simulation-focused conference, HxGN Live Design & Engineering 2021, which was held Oct.…
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…
Food Co., a pseudonym for a large food processing plant in the U.S. Northeast, had been operating successfully for several years when the plant manager realized he had a problem he couldn’t solve alone.
The employees did their jobs well, but they didn’t seem to care much about taking care of each…
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…
According to Harvard Business Review and the post-Covid CMO survey, social media marketing spending saw a 74-percent lift in 2020. In addition, traditional marketing activity was projected to decline during the same time period. Digital marketing is becoming more of a budget focus for companies,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The pressure for industry to reduce harmful emissions and greenhouse gas emissions in particular has increased significantly in the past few years. Recently, President Joe Biden set an aggressive new target for the United States to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent from 2005…
Apprenticeships have a proven track record of producing strong results for both employers and workers. Apprenticeship programs offer access to hundreds of occupations in high-growth and emerging industries, with an average annual starting salary of $72,000 for employees who complete a program and a…
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…
More than 130 million pounds of peaches are produced in Georgia per year, and the Southern staple has a total farm gate value of more than $71 million, according to recent estimates.
But cultivating peaches is a complex and manually intensive process that has put a strain on many farms stretched…
(Markforged: Watertown, MA) -- Markforged, creator of the integrated metal and carbon fiber additive manufacturing platform, The Digital Forge, proudly announces Eiger Fleet, a cloud-based software solution designed to accelerate the adoption of additive manufacturing operations at scale.
Additive…
Learning from past failures is the best way to understand and prevent future equipment breakdowns. In practice, that learning process falls under the umbrella of failure analysis.
These days, there are plenty of failure analysis techniques to choose from. They all come with a specific set of…
To many people, a measurement sounds mundane, like marking ticks on a ruler or reading the line on a thermometer. It’s a piece of data. And they tend to think that improved measurements look like finer and finer ticks on a ruler—which doesn’t seem very exciting.
But making new measurements is more…
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…
‘We didn’t get here on our own,” said Brian Dieter, president and CEO of Baldrige Award-recipient Mary Greeley Medical Center (MGMC), speaking at the 32nd Baldrige Quest for Excellence Conference. “We think we are very much better as a result of having learned from [other Baldrige Award recipients…
Manufacturers should routinely ask themselves: “How do I know what my problems are?” The old-school way to answer this question was based on having the resources to produce spreadsheets of operational data and the expertise to analyze the data and understand how to respond.
This does not describe…
(Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence: North Kingstown, RI) -- Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division announced the North American debut of REcreate, a new reverse engineering software solution at RAPID + TCT 2021.
RAPID attendees got the first look at REcreate and its smarter, faster…
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…
I was recently on a trip to visit a manufacturing facility for one of our clients. My connecting flight didn’t arrive on time, which delayed my arrival and put me on a tight schedule.
When I got to the rental car agency, I saw more than 20 people waiting in line, and my heart sunk. “Should I call…
