Toward the end of summer, I was part of an assembled mass of governors and manufacturers at a Walmart-led summit in Florida. My boss, the Secretary of Commerce (or most accurately, my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss) was there, too.

(Instron: Norwood, MA) -- Instron, a leading provider of testing equipment designed to evaluate mechanical properties of materials and components, has launched its Digital Image Correlation (DIC) Software.

From metal-fitting factories that keep machinery calibrated manually to high-tech companies whose production systems use self-diagnosing analytics, every manufacturer is continually working to improve shop-floor performance using analytics.

Scene: corporate retreat for senior leaders of a Fortune 100 company. Theme: creativity. Agenda item: purpose. I have placed a solitary Zen stone in the center of each table.