Recently I wrote about the difficulties that the U.S. auto industry finds itself in, due to its over-reliance on the build for inventory business model, as well as dependency on SUV sales for profitability.
At the end of that posting, I asked the question as to what might happen if there was a disruptive change to [...]

I have been a little short of time to write posts here recently, but I hope to resume in the next day or so.
In the meantime, I came across a new blog which is very interesting. The ddb NOLA blog  is run by the participants in the Digital Design Build New Orleans LouisianA project, [...]

In a post titled ‘3D Printer Brings Vision to the Poor‘, Mark Proffitt looks at how digital manufacturing technology is being used to provide eyeglasses to people in low-income countries, where the conventional optician service would be far too expensive for those that need it.
Mark Proffitt notes that:
There are two obstacles to providing eye glasses [...]

The Discover magazine website has an article about Behrokh Khoshnevis, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, who has made a ‘contour crafter’.  This machine is a type of digital wall builder, where a robotically controlled nozzle squeezes a ribbon of concrete. When the nozzle completes a circuit, it tops the previous ribbon [...]

Webpronews.com staff writer Mike Sachoff reports on customized music provider Orpheus, which allows media producers to create customized music that will fit the specific needs of their projects. It uses a web-based software engine that allows the user to create custom music cues tailored their specific needs.
According to the article:
“Users can control the length [...]

Jeff Howe, who wrote the original Wired Magazine article on crowdsourcing, is going to write a book on the crowdsourcing phenomenon.
The publication date is Spring 2008.  Hopefully I’ll have got through my current backlog of reading by then.

The Harvard Business Review has published its list of ‘Breakthrough Ideas for 2007‘. Included on the list is ‘An Emerging Hotbed of User-Centered Innovation’, which is described by Eric Von Hippel, who first described the ‘Lead User’ concept twenty years ago.
Von Hippel notes that:
“In an array of industries, producer-centered innovation is being eclipsed by [...]

The latest edition of academic publication ‘International Journal of Manufacturing Technology’ is a special issue on e-Manufacturing and Mass Customization. The issue is guest-edited by Dr. Pingyu Jiang, of the State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, part of the School of Mechanical Engineering at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China.
In his editorial, Dr. Jiang [...]