Tag: Social Product Development

3 Tips on Social Networking from Jabil

Tim Ingold Jr.

Tim Ingold, director of engineering development at Jabil—a global provider of electronics manufacturing services—recently spoke at PlanetPTC Live in Orlando, Florida, about the power of social networks. Using social networking in product development can foster real collaboration and help identify experts and talent that would otherwise be hidden, according to Ingold. Social tools can open up bidirectional communication and spark productivity …

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Social Product Development – What’s the True ROI?

Web 2.0 is everywhere, and social business software is quickly moving into the enterprise, but is there real value? What’s the ROI for a manufacturing company whose product development team is pumping out new product innovations every day? Social Product Development is what happens when you combine Web 2.0 and product development – but how do you justify an investment …

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5 Ways 2011 Changed the Way You Engineer

flickr.com/photos/anpimental/

It’s been a year of change in the world of engineering – how we think about products, and how and where we build them. As we welcome in 2012, here are five interesting developments to leave you with: 1. Growth, Decline, and Changing Demographics: The worldwide CAD industry grew to $7 billion in 2011 according to the 2012 CAD Report …

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New Product Development: From Post-it Sticky Notes to Volvo Trucks

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Smart people create great products through hard work, team efforts and, sometimes, by happenstance. The invention of the Post-it Sticky Note is an example of the latter. The product development surrounding a Volvo FH truck represents a new and better way. Then: Sticky notes and a chance encounter. As the story goes, in the ‘70s, a 3M chemist named Spencer …

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Windchill SocialLink 2.0 Moves Beyond Social Software

This past fall PTC released the latest iteration of Windchill SocialLink, a product focused on bringing Web 2.0 concepts to PLM to benefit product teams. Windchill SocialLink 2.0 exemplifies “social product development” and continues to separate itself from generic social software by focusing on product development processes and engineering use cases. Windchill SocialLink is highly integrated with the Windchill PLM …

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Is Product Innovation a Social Activity?

Ben Kaufman, CEO of Quirky (photo by David Johnson - Entrepreneur Magazine)

When it comes to product innovation should big industry rely on the voice of the consumer to guide its decisions? How much investment should a company make in social media monitoring, outreach and market research? A recent post (Can You “Go With Your Gut” in Product Development?) on this blog asked whether market research was worth anything in product innovation. Some …

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Social Product Development: Quirky and PTC

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Happy Friday – and what a lovely Friday it is. I have the feeling the folks at Quirky think so as well…with the announcement that they’ve just raised an additional $16 million in funding and a new TV show on the Sundance channel debuting this month, it’s safe to say that all of August probably looks pretty rosy to the …

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Bees and Social Product Development…Really!

I had the great fortune this past weekend to attend a lecture given by Cornell’s Dr. Thomas D. Seeley on decision-making in honeybees. While I am very interested in the bees (yes I am), I couldn’t help but to let me mind wander to comparisons of human behavior. So what does honeybee decision-making have to do with product development? I …

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Manufacturers Get Social

As our lovely, romantic Valentine’s Day holiday approaches, I have to admit I’ve strayed, Social Product Development blog. I recently contributed a guest post to Microsoft’s Vertical Industries blog: Manufacturers Get Social. The post is about the different interpretations of Social Product Development in the industry today – and the potential value of each. Here’s an excerpt: As a result, …

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Putting the Social Back in Social: Collaborative Product Development

The other day, one of my Twitter contacts shared an article from Abhay Prasad, Senior Manager at Cisco, on the “Value of Social Software in Manufacturing” (published in Manufacturing Business Technology). The piece was an interesting look at the potential benefits of social technology across the manufacturing value chain. It said a lot of things I agree with – a …

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