Computer Aided Innovation Conference (Day 1)

Today was the first of two days I am spending at the 2nd IFIP Working Conference on Computer Aided Innovation.  It is an interesting conference that has attracted an international body of attendees.  Here are some highlights from the conference thus far.

Dr. Andrew Brown Jr., Executive Director & Chief Technologist for Innovation & Technology of Delphi Corporation, opened the conference with a keynote speech titled Innovation Today & Tomorrow.  In this talk, Dr. Brown discussed Delphi, his view of innovation, and how Delphi seeks to create value through innovation.

As Dr. Brown put it, “Innovation resides at the intersection of invention and insight.  Innovation creates new value.”  This position clear distinguishes between invention and innovation.  In essence, he is defining innovation as the creation and delivery of new customer value in the market—a theme he returned to several times in the session.

Several key success factors were identified as being important to innovation.  Among these were: active leadership, customer and market insight, strong execution which was defined as delivery of the right product at the right time and delivering exceptional value to the most important customer in the value chain (a concept Dr. Brown called value innovation).  This view is one I see repeated globally at high performance innovation organizations that are engaged in sustainable innovation disciplines.

It is highlighting Dr. Brown’s comments on active leadership.  All too often, companies talk innovation, but the management commitment to establish the living innovation culture is missing.  Dr. Brown showed that Delphi is seriously committed to making innovation a value driving core competence by outlining the role executive management plays in Delphi’s innovation model.  He also identified specific practices employed by Delphi to encourage and reward innovative behavior by employees.

After the key note speech, there were a number of presentations in two tracks.  Some of the sessions I attended included:

Locating Creativity in a Framework of Designing for Innovation, presented by John Garo of George Mason University, proposed an ontological framework for designing which was then used to discuss the points in the design process where creative thinking takes place.

Another session presented by Alexander Hesmer of BIBA, Supporting the Systemization of Early-Stage-Innovation by Means of Collaborative Working Environments, reviewed the work a multi-national team in investigating new software models to support innovation.  Many interesting concepts were presented that showed the breath of creative thought that is happening globally around capturing innovation practices in software.

Dr. Noel Leon-Rovira of ITESM presented a session on Comparison of Strategies for the Optimization/Innovation of Crankshaft Balance.  While the title of the session may sound a little dry and chewy, this was a very interesting examination of the application of genetic algorithm to a very complex problem of physical design.  The technique of splinization of the geometric model and using the control points of the spline as the genes demonstrated the applicability of goal programming to this space.

The day ended with a panel discussion on Optimization and Innovation Software in Product Development.  I was one of the panelists.  The discussion was lively and covered a wide range of topics that examined the very nature of innovation and what we should expect software to contribute to the process.