Great presentations in the Social Product Development and Collaboration track at the 2012 PI Congress / PLM Roadmap Conference

Great presentations in the Social Product Development and Collaboration track at the 2012 PI Congress / PLM Roadmap Conference last week. The attendees were really interested in how social is impacting product development and product lifecycle management (PLM). The presentations will be available for download shortly.

My presentation discussed how applying information theory concepts improves collaboration and resulting innovation. This concept is a little "out there" I know, but it does make a huge amount of sense. When an information channel is stable and low entropy, a huge amount of  information, new data can be put over the channel. Innovation requires newness, change and lots of information transfer. We also discussed how to create a stable information channel using social media concepts and capabilities. For more information, you can contact me.

John Mannisto from Whirlpool Corporation presented his teams collaboration techniques. He discussed The “Commons”. It's a place where  Social Layers can combine and cross over to maximize our cross-flow of knowledge. He wants to be able to “go viral” with good ideas. The “Commons” social layer is the “water cooler” where explicit and tacit knowledge can combine.

John also told us we need to adopt new tools and new behavior - we need to get our kids involved. We need to learn from outside of work, because social media is outpacing corporate collaboration. We need to combine the new-generation behavior with the old engineering. Most engineering is based on Newton, Euler, and a bunch of French Mathematicians. What continues to change is the way we execute.

Bruce Richardson from Salesforce.com gave a great presentation on the coming combination of customer relationship management (CRM), social and PLM. With 4.5 billion people connected to social networks today, social has become the new way for sharing what we are doing and what we care about in our personal lives.  And for businesses, there are over 150 million daily conversions happening that are related to products and companies.  People are talking about your products and your company.  This is how your brand is being created.  You need to be able to connect with these customers.