With NIWeek right around the corner, talk of innovation is in the air. As part of this talk, I’ve been browsing through book entitled “Experimentation Matters” by Stefan H Thomke. Thomke is a Harvard Business School professor who focuses on technology and innovation. The subtitle of his book is “Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation”. I know what a lot of you may be thinking – sometimes these HBR articles and books tend to come across as a little to lofty, academic, or perhaps focus more on consumer product areas rather than engineering topics.
Thomke’s book, on the other, hits right in the center of our world by focusing on how new tools can enable engineers to innovate faster and generate better products with a shorter time to market. He studies the automotive industry – one that has a huge investment in tools with a lot of history. The general hypothesis is that with better design and simulation tools – higher fidelity models, faster simulation, etc – automotive companies can iterate faster and reduce the number of prototypes they have to actually build and test. While this sounds obvious, in practice it didn’t actually prove itself out. He looks at hundreds of new car designs, comparing the Japanese automakers with the Big 3 in Detroit. It turns out that better tools alone will not yield better results – new tools have to be accompanied with new approaches to the problem to result in real improvement. In fact, in some areas, the new tools led to more time and money spent, as evidenced by this quote from his work:
“Many of our engineers were not ready to accept the results from simulated tests [that is, those using the new CAE tools] because they aren’t [considered] real. When senior management decided to invest in new information technologies, simulation software and specialists, they anticipated substantial savings. But the more we simulated, the more physical prototypes were built to verify that simulation was accurate. No one was going to make a commitment and decision based on a computer model only. Because of simulation, we ended up spending more money on prototype testing than before.” [source]
There are many themes here that are both interesting and directly relevant to our space in measurement and automation:
- New tools can’t be used simply as substitutes without changing how you approach the problem. New tools should also drive process change.
- Simulation and test need to fit together in a complementary way – one will never eliminate the need for the other.
- Change is not always for the better, and technology for technology sake may not help your business.
I suppose you might think we are concerned about simulation and its impact on testing. On the contrary, LabVIEW and our virtual instrumentation strategy is not just a new technology, but really a whole new way of thinking about test and measurement. The fact that we approach the measurement task from a software perspective, means we have a much better opportunity to tie simulation tools more closely with our test platform and save real time and money for our customers. And finally, with our RIO-based prototyping approach, we see even more opportunity for the simulation world folding in nicely with our platform.
Even though Thomke’s book is not particularly new (published in 2003), its a particularly interesting read about how tools- particularly simulation and test – have real impact on product development.
