Innovation, in particular “sustainable innovation” is becoming, in our modern business environment, an essential element for growth and profitability. Combined with the global trend towards digitalization of all business functions, engineering processes and tools need to be adjusted accordingly.
Properly designing and implementing a digital, model-based, and data-driven innovation platform promises to address key engineering goals: optimize product lifecycle costs, improve quality and reliability, reduce time-to-market, and free up time and resources for employees to be creative and innovative—a prerequisite for sustainable and profitable growth.
Introduction
Business growth depends on developing new and improved products, efficiently, and getting them to the customer faster than the competition. Industry leading manufacturers have developed robust processes to regularly accomplish this in a consistent, profitable way. But they have typically focused on sustaining existing product development processes, with incremental changes and new features, focused on the incremental costs and associated risks. This approach tends to overlook or even minimize the introduction of new and truly innovative design alternatives. A major issue is: Can existing processes support sustainable innovation? For many, this has proven elusive and difficult to accomplish in a consistent way with predictable product delivery results—meeting customer requirements while also achieving time to market, quality, and cost targets.
In this paper, we review key considerations for establishing a predictable, repeatable, and sustainable innovation engine. Leaders are innovating at the “speed of thought” understanding that knowledge and data are the foundation, while processes enable and culture defines behavior, which in turn defines a company’s market position. Critical building blocks that should be considered to enable a culture of innovation (behavior) and allow rapid knowledge development and decision-making include:
- Build and share knowledge
- Empower people
- Explore all that is possible
- Optimally use all available assets
- Remove waste
- Understand associated risks
One of the key elements that must be considered is a modernized product realization foundation—a technology platform—that aids the organization in delivering on the building blocks noted above. Such an “Innovation Platform” must operate seamlessly, connecting ideation participants with critical decision supporting data in a real-time environment, providing a reliable, productive, and flexible environment for sustainable engineering and scientific innovation.
Leaders in their respective industries are beginning to utilize these innovation platforms within which virtual modeling and performance simulation tools are key components of sustainable innovation. Innovation platforms enable the rapid evaluation and validation of numerous design options and variants.
Using a platform, processes and products are optimized up front by utilizing simulation and analysis tools and business analytics to guarantee profitable growth, control cost, manage risk, and improve time-to-market. Insights are developed more rapidly, and shared with all participants—in the context needed to enable better business decisions.
An innovation platform provides the foundational environment and core capabilities required to capture, manage and repurpose the intellectual property of the global enterprise. A useful illustration of how a platform is able to power sustainable innovation with simulation and analysis is designing for additive manufacturing (AM). This industrial application, also referred to as 3D printing, promises great benefits of using new materials to create lightweight products with optimized shapes previously beyond manufacturability. AM has traditionally been a tedious process with disconnected data and participants. A platform approach provides the ability to connect the various functions, like material science with design, engineering, and manufacturing within a common environment to design and produce products for specific functional purposes. It enables collaboration, promoting cultural change, and therefore provides a new “business experience” for organizations.
This paper reviews the industry challenges and requirements for sustainable innovation in relation to the evolution of innovation platforms—such as the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform from Dassault Systèmes. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides a flexible and innovation-enabling product development environment which can be implemented on the cloud or on premise.(...)
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