A recently published article in the UK press, (source: Daily Mail 6 June – so it must be accurate 
) tells us about research by Vodafone. They have found that it is the more experienced people who are most likely to come up with innovations to help firms thrive, rather than the younger staff pushing progress at work.
A survey of 2000 workers found that 40% of over 55′s enjoy coming up with new ideas. Typically they will generate ideas every few months with 1 in 10 averaging a new idea every day!
This compares with just over 20% of workers in the range 16-24 eager to promote new ideas.
Motivation also differs between the age groups with the younger workers seeking financial reward, and the older worker simply looking for praise and the best results for the business.
A further finding in the survey revealed 70% of workers thought their companies were not good at rewarding innovation, while 25% were so discouraged that they never bothered to tell anyone their bright ideas.
British researchers are turning to Linux and embedded processors to build a fleet of tiny, robotic helicopters capable of swarming like angry bees and evaluating their surroundings with a single hive mind.
The University of Essex’s UltraSwarm project is an experiment in swarm intelligence and wireless cluster computing that might one day spawn military surveillance applications. In one scenario, a flock of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, with video cameras could take in a hostile landscape from a variety of angles and process the image locally, in the sky.
Read the full article at wired.com
http://www.wired.com/news/linux/0,1411,67695,00.html?tw=rss.TOP
Is it possible to capture knowledge used when a product is being designed in a form that can be easily re-used in the future? or alternatively, How can that knowledge be captured and how should it be stored?
There are similarities in capturing Design Intent during the design of products with the retention and re-use (sharing) of knowledge when developing software products or indeed in most fields.
Design Intent is not just a question of recording the history or sequence of commands used in the creation of a design. Give the same job to a number of people and it is unlikely that they would follow the exact same sequence of events (although the end result may be the same). Consider how many different ways users can create even the simplest geometry such as a rectangle – the end result may be the same, but the steps taken to get there can be completely different.
Taken away from the simplest examples, the problem can become extremely complex – Why was this hole placed here, What material should be used to provide the given strength at the lowest weight? etc.
The problem is posed, but what is the solution?
When proprietary digital content is exposed to the Internet, it can become an easy target for malicious parties who wish to reproduce unauthorized copies. For these reasons, protection of digital intellectual property has become an active research topic and many people have begun to research digital watermarking methods.
Here is an interesting paper on the subject Shape Intrinsic Watermarks for 3D Solids
http://deslab.mit.edu/DesignLab/Watermarking/
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