Sweet Dreams about Product Innovation Platforms

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

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.

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

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.

Dassault Systems SolidWorks

Siemens PLM

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