July 01, 2008
Geographically distributed design teams have become crucial, yet a significant number fail to accomplish their objectives. The reason is that long distances and cultural differences compromise...
Learning Center
IRI resources assist your day-to-day R&D functions and help in problem solving. Search by keyword, topic, or your R&D role to find tools to help you manage your organization's R&D and innovation process more effectively.
August 30, 2016
When Marshall McLuhan wrote, “The medium is the message,” he meant to emphasize the implications of any new technology (or medium) beyond the specific context of its use (or content of its message)...
October 17, 2016
The Big Data project is part of IRI’s strategic research platform on Digitalization and its Implications for R&D Management. The goal of the study is to validate the hypothesis that...
October 17, 2016
Imagine a factory that never stops and is constantly re-inventing itself to continuously improve products and how they are made. Enabled by a digital thread that weds virtual tools with physical...
November 09, 2016
As the technology for virtual experimentation and simulation has matured, interest in its uses for R&D has grown. Indeed, investment in virtual experimentation and simulation in R&D is...
July 01, 2007
In my previous “Human Side” column, I proposed basic research/technology leadership training under the headings of four Ps: Purpose, Process, People, Presentation (1). I asked readers to let me know...
September 01, 2007
We often talk about how different our world is from our parents’ world. We then extrapolate this thinking to our children and try to imagine the world they will face. This is hard enough. However,...
November 01, 2007
As a long-time industrial researcher now turned academic, I believe that the careers of industrial researchers in nearly all areas of science and technology would benefit significantly from formal...
November 01, 2007
Innovation has always been a marriage of what’s needed with what’s possible. Originally, “what’s possible” was about technology, but at Procter &Gamble today it’s about creating and delivering a...
November 01, 2007
Reinventing Project Management is important to R&D/technology managers but not because it actually reinvents project management. In fact, it really doesn’t even really address how to manage...
November 01, 2006
Remember when the management gurus told you your job was to build teamwork? Now the in-word is collaboration, because innovation of all kinds requires high levels of interactivity, not only within...
July 01, 2005
“Accelerated radical innovation just doesn’t happen,” Mark Papermaster, vice president for microprocessor technology development at IBM, told a workshop at The University of Toledo in March. In...
January 20, 2017
Vernor Vinge is a science fiction writer whose work includes A Fire Upon the Deep, Rainbows End , and “Fast Times at Fairmont High,” among others. He is also the author, in 1993, of “The Coming...
March 22, 2017
How will Big Data inform, enable and disrupt R&D activities? How can R&D management improve from Big Data? Who will be using Big Data and what will they need to know? What technologies and...
March 01, 2004
The wide range of strategic contexts in which technology roadmapping can be applied makes the technique inherently flexible. The strategic context can be described in terms of a number of dimensions...
May 14, 2018
I was invited to visit China for the first time in 1989, to speak about expert systems, then at the forefront of practical AI. At that time, technology transfer from the West to China was a one-way...