Category: Product development

Framtidens fabrik ligger i ditt vardagsrum

Ibland verkar det som om jak­ten på pro­duk­tivitet och konkur­ren­skraft bara leder utveck­lin­gen i en enda rik­t­ning: mot cen­tralis­er­ing. Det gäller både kon­sum­tion och pro­duk­tion. Tillverkn­ing av vardagspro­duk­ter fly­t­tas i allt högre grad till tillväxtlän­der där det finns gott om arbet­skraft och lön­erna är låga. Vi väl­jer ofta att göra våra inköp i stor­mark­nader, eller […]

Monday December 19th, 2011 in Product development, production, technology, The Future | No Comments »

Exploring Objective-C programming

I used to do a lot of pro­gram­ming. As a young teenager I was the lucky owner of a Com­modore C64 doing my best to pro­gram mov­ing starfields and Urid­ium clones in assem­bler. Much later, dur­ing one stage of my career I was heav­ily involved in train traf­fic sim­u­la­tor devel­op­ment. This meant get­ting fairly proficient […]

Friday September 30th, 2011 in innovation, Product development, software, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Product and process development in steel industries

What are the gen­eral char­ac­ter­is­tics that set the steel indus­try apart from con­ven­tional man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try? And, depend­ing on the answer, how do the processes of prod­uct devel­op­ment and pro­duc­tion engi­neer­ing dif­fer from other man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­tries? One dif­fer­ence is that steel pro­duc­ers are faced with a diver­gent pro­duc­tion flow where a few con­stituent mate­ri­als are combined […]

Thursday September 30th, 2010 in Product development, production, research, Steel | No Comments »

Google’s 20 percent innovation time policy

From time to time I’ve read about com­pa­nies that pro­vide their employ­ees with some frac­tion of their paid work­ing time to do what they want. That is, to work on and elab­o­rate any of their own ideas that they like as long as they fall rea­son­ably within the company’s field of busi­ness. The most famous […]

Wednesday August 25th, 2010 in innovation, Product development | 1 Comment »

How small batches improve product development

The idea of lean prod­uct devel­op­ment (LPD) came nat­u­rally when lean pro­duc­tion evolved into the more gen­eral con­cept of “lean think­ing”. Prod­uct devel­op­ment is dif­fer­ent from man­u­fac­tur­ing because, as soon as you tar­get non–trivial devel­op­ment tasks, they will con­tain a degree of risk that intro­duces vari­a­tion. You can’t remove this vari­a­tion, because eco­nomic rewards in […]

Sunday March 14th, 2010 in Lean production, Product development | No Comments »

Lean product development and creativity

Yes­ter­day I was made aware of this arti­cle on the web­site of the Royal Insti­tute of tech­nol­ogy, KTH, where Mar­gareta Norell Bergen­dahl, pro­fes­sor in inte­grated prod­uct devel­op­ment  at KTH, dis­cusses the dan­ger of uncrit­i­cally adopt­ing lean prin­ci­ples in prod­uct devel­op­ment. It so hap­pens that a cou­ple of days ago I started read­ing Don­ald G. Reinertsen’s […]

Thursday February 18th, 2010 in Books, Product development | No Comments »