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For decades, competitiveness in manufacturing was based on a single objective — cutting costs. Now, the mantra has changed - and rightly so - to innovation. But what exactly does that mean? There is a clever television advertisement in which a room full of people is laying on their backs on mats in an otherwise sterile room. A man opens the door and asks what they are doing — one of them says they are "ideating". When the man then asks — "how do you do that?", the response is "we haven't ideated that yet". The closing line is "stop thinking and start doing". As clever as this spot is, it brings up some key points related to innovation in manufacturing.

The first one is this: innovation is about collaborating — about looking at things in new ways, about asking questions, about involving people whenever and wherever the opportunity exists. It's about having some basic tools in place that facilitate this sort of activity — the means to find information that's relevant to the topic at hand, being able to use that information through reuse or repurposing, the ability to share that information easily and effectively with others, and a way to manage both the information and the activity.

The second is that being good at product innovation management means doing it — not thinking about, planning it, or having it be something that becomes arduous for those involved. It must not be a monolithic solution or application suite that takes years and untold amounts of money and time to implement, only to fail to deliver any real value to the organization. Rather, it should be something that can be built in pieces, assembled and disassembled as requirements change, extended as new tools become available — and all delivered to the users in a way that makes it seem a natural part of what they do every day.

The predominance of the Microsoft Office platform, and the client applications which are a part of it (such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook) have evolved into the kind of platform that — if made capable of handling product data — is an ideal delivery vehicle for a product innovation management platform. Actify and its partners have made a commitment to the Office platform, and SharePoint in particular, as a foundation for delivering our solutions to the customers. We have combined robust product data visualization with workflow, project management, and IP security to deliver a scalable solution for the innovation activities of your enterprise and we call it the DesignShare solution. Learn more about the DesignShare product line.