NEW FOR 2015 - Join us on Wednesday, October 7@ 1:30 p.m. for a full afternoon of activities, including a keynote from an executive of FirstBuild, a tour of the First Build Microfactory, and a networking dinner!

CIMdata’s Social Product Development, Innovation, & Collaboration Workshop is a must-attend event for industrial organizations and solution and service providers involved with open innovation, new product development, and ensuring Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and social technology solutions meet business expectations. It provides independent education and a collaborative networking environment where ideas, trends, experiences, and relationships critical to these topics germinate and take root.

The theme for this workshop is The New Age of Collaboration, Innovation, and Product Development .

With rapid advances in digital technology and hyper-connectivity around the globe, the early 21st century has all the signs of a transitional time with no clear pathway to the future. Complexity is increasing as familiar boundaries are being altered forever and information is growing exponentially. While PLM has been embraced by many as a successful business strategy and more recently has emerged as a platform for innovation, significant challenges remain. Companies want to embed business processes with intelligent workflows in the tools to help easily identify experts, get close to customers, collaborate externally with partners, and reduce operational cycles with better internal collaboration, yet they struggle with strategic, cultural, and technology questions.

This workshop will focus on creating insights into the following questions that were voiced in our previous workshops:

• How to balance openness and speed with security and protection of intellectual property (IP)?
• How to integrate the fuzzy front end with PLM?
• How to address cultural challenges in adopting new business models, such as co-creation, and digital technology solutions?
• How to leverage large amounts of unstructured data that is created through social?
• How to make benefits of social more tangible?

Attendees will learn about:

• The key aspects to consider when starting your journey to transform your business with collaborative innovation and social technologies
• Success stories and examples where mature businesses are leveraging collaborative innovation approaches for rapid innovation and strategic advantage
• Creative approaches to industry and academia collaborative partnerships that are leading to win-win for key stakeholders
• IP considerations when forming collaborative partnerships
• Trends in social and traditional technologies that support collaborative innovation and product development
• The latest research and insights including a global collaboration framework and taxonomy and a holistic innovation management framework and terminology

What to Expect If You Attend

At this workshop you will hear real world examples of how mature companies are inventing and adopting new collaborative partnership models for innovation and joint value creation. You will be exposed to various examples of partnering and co-creation. Participants should also expect to gain a solid understanding of trends in social and traditional collaboration technologies for innovation and product development. This will be a lively forum where participants are encouraged to discuss real issues, share their experiences and insights into these issues, and have their voices heard and opinions count. This event provides a forum to network with professionals from diverse industries and CIMdata’s subject matter experts. There will be plenty of time for open (and private) discussions.