Dear Desktop Engineering Reader: Years ago I worked for a mega-publisher. The HQ honchos were coming on an inspection trip. Our dear local leader summoned us to the conference room — which, ironic in hindsight, had a mural of cows grazing — and ordered each of us to come up with three new product ideas by the end of the day so that we could demonstrate our innovative pep. Sadly, for many companies today, the new product innovation process is not much better. Goldfire from Invention Machine is a better way. Now, Invention Machine describes Goldfire as an innovation software platform for transforming ideas into products, generating and validating concepts, and making innovation a sustainable process. I think of it as a system that simulates creative thinking to stimulate engineers, scientists, and researchers to think creatively. What this means for your enterprise is that Goldfire lets you harness all those ideas that flit across your corporate synapses then disappear. Once you corral an idea, Goldfire helps you incubate it until the idea proves itself real or a dud. By incubating, I mean that Goldfire focuses and informs an engineer's thought processes by automating innovation tasks inherent in a product's lifecycle and infusing ideas with knowledge drawn from whatever data sources it takes to uncover and validate new ways of seeing or doing something. It incorporates more than a dozen methodologies and tools as diverse as TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving), process and design analysis, multilingual semantic search, risk analysis, and patent analytics. It can even analyze markets. But what it really does is help engineers generate and develop ideas with all the available data they can muster as well as alternative data that they might never have thought of. The result is far less wasted R&D time and effort and more innovative products. Goldfire also provides metrics so that bigwigs can see what's happening across their company's innovation landscape, unearth trends, and obtain detailed project views. And it is designed to meld into your company's culture, making Goldfire's process sustainable and repeatable. All of this would seem to boil down to getting better products to market faster and cost effectively, of course. But it's really more than that. With the economy in withdrawal, now is the time to build for the future. Wasting time in meetings where someone tells you to put your innovation caps on is not going to do it any more. Goldfire lets you grab and focus knowledge on your ideas so that you can develop them to their fullest. That, of course, is the heart and soul of innovation. You can read more about the latest release of Goldfire from today's Pick of the Week write-up. Check out the YouTube videos from the links too. Thanks, Pal. — Lockwood Anthony J. Lockwood Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering Magazine Read today's Pick of the Week
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