AU Innovation Forum: Everything Changes

Last week, right about now, Autodesk was unveiling its PLM solution for the manufacturing market in an Autodesk University session called “Everything Changes”. I was fortunate to have been invited to speak at the session, along with Oleg Shilovitsky, Randi Zuckerberg (yes, that Zuckerberg) and Steve Bodnar (yes, him) and MC Rob Cohee of Autodesk. Oleg posted his presentation slides here — worth checking out even without his excellent delivery — while the gist of Steve’s material can be found at Autodesk’s site for the event: autodesk.com/everythingchanges. I was asked to give a “TED-style” talk, which means my slides have very little text and showing them to you is rather pointless, even though the images of the mountain bikes are awesome: The mountain bikes were a recurring theme in my talk. Did you know, for example, that mountain bikes didn’t exist until the 1960s, when riders in Northern California cobbled some together from cruiser bikes (heavy, limited gearing and no sex-appeal) and road bikes (sex-appeal, fragile, skinny tires)? What started as a hobby has turned into a $3 billion market in 2010, accounting for half of all bicycles sold in the US. Why and how this happened — and the lessons we can learn from this in managing innovation — was the theme of the presentation. Rather than try to write the whole thing down, here are the three take-aways I hope the audience got: 1. Everyone innovates, all the time. It’s not a special, creative task assigned to just a few people. 2. Harnessing that creativity, making it work for the enterprise, is what PLM should be all about. Too often, people see PLM as an IT structure that gets in the way of their personal productivity, delivering benefit that they can’t see to the overall enterprise. 3. For PLM to be truly useful, it has to speak the language of all of the functions involved in whatever the enterprise does — sales, R&D, design, engineering, field service and so on — receiving data and serving it out in ways that let people act on it in the way that makes them most productive. That means role-based, ubiquitous access. There was a fourth point, but it was so obvious I hope this specialist audience doesn’t really need it. The “P” in “PLM” doesn’t need to stand for Product — it can be Project, Program, Patient (in healthcare), Policy (in the public sector), Private label (retail) … you get the idea. Each has a lifecycle that should be monitored, and lessons learned applied to the next to improve its chances of success. It was fun brainstorming “P”s. In fact, the whole experience was terrific. I believe the Innovation Forum was live on Autodesk University Virtual but am unable to find a replay of the session. If Autodesk posts it, I will update here and on Twitter. More about AU coming once I catch up.