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Elements of Successful Innovation Highlighted at MS&T’12 Plenary |
By Lynne Robinson
Posted on: 11/23/2012 12:00:00 AM... “Innovation means not just doing good science, but also bringing ideas to the marketplace.”
With that comment, Terry P. Smith, technical director, 3M Corporate Research
Materials Laboratory, began exploration of the plenary topic, “Challenges for Materials-Intensive Industries: Consumer Products, Energy, and Transportation” that opened the Materials Science and Technology 2012 Conference & Exhibition (MS&T’12), held October 7-11 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
As the first of three speakers, Smith shared how 3M has maintained its competitive advantage through the implementation of a successful innovation framework. With examples drawn from the corporation’s work in such areas as nanocomposites, automotive lighting, and “green” adhesives, Smith noted that a 3M solution generally “mixes and matches” technology platforms and markets.
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(Click on photos to enlarge.) Elizabeth Holm, TMS Vice President served as moderator and session chair for the MS&T’12 plenary.
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Responding to audience questions are (left to right) Holm, Terry
Smith, Luana Iorio, and Matthew Zaluzec.
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The MS&T’12 opening plenary brought together attendees from all of the conference’s participating societies.
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“Technology is shared across the company,” he said. “Something great being developed in one division often can be used by another.” Enabling this synergy, continued Smith, is a “flat” corporate culture “that allows people to talk among themselves, while also giving them the latitude to do things on their own.”
Other strategies for successful innovation that Smith discussed was the creation of a “strong, centralized research laboratory that serves as a broker of technology” and a coherent strategic vision communicated with all stakeholders and delineating a clear path focused on 3M’s core technology platforms. “The quality and number of technology transfers are important metrics for us,” he said, although he also noted that investing in innovation often requires patience. Meeting the challenge of delivering technologically complex products to the marketplace “plays to the strength of materials scientists,” Smith said, since success requires a multi-disciplinary approach dependent on basic materials, processing, and economic considerations.
While Smith examined the business decisions driving innovation at 3M, Luana Iorio, technology leader, Manufacturing Technologies, GE Global Research, discussed “innovation accelerators” that her company has adopted to speed delivery of new material systems to market. “The intersection of design, materials, and manufacturing is innovation, with software and computational tools facilitating interaction among the groups,” she said. Iorio differentiated this from the conventional approach that dictates materials and manufacturing selection as “a mostly sequential process, with few interactions. This limits design options.”
Iorio continued that the emerging discipline of integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) provides “the framework for collaboration among materials, manufacturing, and product design.” She noted that adopting this approach has opened “opportunities to drive new product capability, giving designers new degrees of freedom that will provide long-term competitive advantage.”
Also accelerating the design cycle at GE has been the utilization of additive manufacturing “to quickly produce and test new design concepts,” said Iorio. She discussed how additive manufacturing enables far greater geometric complexity of materials than conventional processing at a much lower cost, allowing for more customized solutions and holding “great promise to tailor material properties in unprecedented ways.”
The challenge of optimizing both ICME and additive manufacturing, Iorio said, is “too broad for a single company to do alone. Collaboration is essential with universities, companies, and national laboratories.”
Matthew J. Zaluzec, senior technical leader and manager, Global Materials and Manufacturing Research, Ford Motor Company Research and Innovation Center, echoed the themes of cross-disciplinary interaction and organizational collaboration emphasized by the previous two speakers.
Zaluzec’s presentation covered how the automotive sector contends with industry-specific issues rising from high-volume applications, stringent safety regulations, and aggressive fuel economy targets. “We are not necessarily inventing new materials, but rather driving improved quality, performance, and safety at competitive costs. We tend to focus on teaching existing materials new tricks,” he said.
Zaluzec noted that Ford’s efforts have generally focused on advanced high-strength steels, but aluminum, magnesium, and carbon fiber composites also offer new opportunities, enabled by ICME techniques and practices. Like Iorio, Zaluzec urged collaboration to ensure the fullest potential of ICME and highlighted the TMS Second World Congress on ICME and the Orlando Materials Innovation Principles coordinated by TMS as critical steps in this direction. To emphasize this point, Zaluzec closed his presentation with a quote from Henry Ford: “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.”
Editor’s Note: For additional information on the Second World Congress on ICME, July 7–11, 2013, in Salt Lake City, visit the conference website. Background on the Orlando Materials Innovation Principles is available at this link. Look for a detailed retrospective of MS&T’12 programming and events in the January 2013 issue of JOM.
Lynne Robinson is a news and feature writer for TMS.
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