Friday, September 27, 2002

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Darwin Magazine : Knowing the difference A product constraint can be determined by process of elimination: If you are taking care of your customers and are reaching the best customer segments with the right message, then you have a product constraint. KM tools for attacking this primarily involve those that assist R&D. The best of these are research collaboration and rapid prototyping tools, such as SolidWorks (3D modeling and collaboration), Triz (idea generation) and Groove (collaboration). These tools facilitate rapid prototyping, idea generation and idea sharing, and have been shown to create dramatic improvement in a company's innovation rate when the organizational structure for supporting these tools has been carefully designed.

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A couple of new articles on the Tablet PC. Last week in Boston  i had a chance to check out a tablet PC in reallife for the first time and what i saw was very impressive. Personally  i'm very interested to see if this is a suitable replacement for my old Vaio but from a business point of view i see a lot of potential for solving problems in vertical scenario's for the Medical or Construction industry to name a few. Think of walking on a constructionsite, having all CADdrawings available offline, to view and to make notes and remarks on these files by drawing directly on your screen, later when you get back online, all this data is being synchronized for the other members of that shared space following the OHIO principle (Only Handle Information Once) This behaviour resembles and leverages the day to day practice of the constructionsite where people still prefer to draw on paper. A combination of Groove and the Tablet PC might offer the first real viable alternative for some old analogue business routines.