A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Sweet Dreams about Product Innovation Platforms

Sweet Dreams about Product Innovation Platforms
Oleg
Oleg
5 October, 2015 | 2 min for reading

sweet-dreams-plm-vendors

Everyone likes innovation. It gives you good feeling and brings the whole power of imagination into your brain. If you Google “innovation”, you can find so many interesting things. For example, famous quotes from Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford and others about innovation. Navigate here to read more. My favorite quote is the following one:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. [A. Einstein]

Switch gears into engineering, manufacturing, product lifecycle management and… product innovation platforms. I found the last one emerged as a new buzzword of trend in PLM visionary marketing.

Few months ago, Engineering.com posted a TV report by Verdi Ogewell –Product Innovation Platform: Plug’n’play in next generation PLM – TV-report. It brings voice from PLM analysts from Gartner, CIMdata and others about the need to adopt a new thinking and new type of IT platforms – “Product Innovation Platforms”. The new platform vision supposed to break company data silos and based on system design and holistic governance. The following picture of Innovation Platform was captured by Engineering.com from Gartner presentation

gartner-product-innovation-platforms

I found Gartner’s Marc Halpern presentation about “Product Innovation Platform”.  According to the presentation, Product Innovation Platforms is more than today’s design and PLM software.

gartner-pip-different

Here you can see list of candidates to become such a platform (according to Gartner)

gartner-pip-vendors

The adoption of “product innovation platform” marketing is growing. Below you can see few pictures I captured during past conferences and websites. It is a clear indication – marketing is up to the speed with adoption of “product innovation platforms”.

Autodesk PLM vision.

autodesk-plm-innovation-platform

Dassault Systems SolidWorks

solidworks-innovation-platform

Siemens PLM

siemens-plm-innovation-platform

What is my conclusion? I found “Product Innovation Platform” buzz misleading. I can see a point of innovation. Show me somebody who doesn’t want to innovate. However, things such as community, discovery, reuse, accessibility and others are more desired characteristics of products rather than something that can be combined into a single “platform”. While dreams about product innovation are sweet, the actual definition about future product development platform remains open. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
24 July, 2013

Social tools are capturing lots of noise and making real impact these days. After initial hype of MySpace and early...

9 October, 2021

There is no topic in engineering and manufacturing software that can raise more debates than Part Numbers. I remember discussing...

25 March, 2009

We’ve had a discussion about the  future and benefits of cloud applications. Without rehashing the conversation too much, it seems...

10 April, 2021

Earlier this week, one of my readers asked me a question about the lifecycle of IT systems and PLM systems...

8 November, 2017

Platform is the next magic word these days. Everyone is building “platform” these days. Platform is sweet word, which sounds...

6 April, 2019

I spent last week at Oracle NetSuite event in Las Vegas –  Suite World 2019. Want to learn more –...

20 November, 2012

Are you familiar with PLM platform diagrams? You can see lots of them in presentations, marketing materials, websites and conferences....

29 February, 2020

There are very few topics in PLM vocabulary that can raise fewer debates that these three letters – FFF, which...

18 August, 2010

I had a chance to read Enterprise Road Kill by The Vuuch Voice. The discussion Chris suggested in his post...

Blogroll

To the top