One-to-One: Innovations at Invention Machine

I had the chance to talk with … Jim
Todhunter the CTO or Invention Machine about the
new release of their Goldfire product, and was given a
demonstration by Rick Bigley. It was a good opportunity
to catch up with a very interesting company, and one that is doing
some very good work with their clients in regards to operationalizing
innovation. What’s new in the release? A more
operational focus, for one!

What do they Offer?
Invention Machine
provides a toolset that helps companies innovate. Their solution
provides methodologies and information that allow engineers
and product developers to take a repeatable, sustainable approach
to product innovation. Through design methodologies like
Triz and their unique semantic search capabilities, they offer a
rich environment for engineers to develop insights and further
their product and engineering concepts. In recent times, they have
also started to become more embedded in PLM including their

relationship with Siemens PLM, which to me is a natural fit for
their capabilities.

What does the New Release Offer?
There are
quite a few enhancements, and I will point you to Invention
Machine’s Goldfire 5.0 Release Announcement for the
details. What struck me was that transition from toolkit to
solution. What do I mean by that? As much as Invention
Machine talked about standard processes for innovation, they did
not offer the process in their solution. They offered the enabling
tools. Now, they have re-organized the application in a couple of
critical ways:

• The solution now embodies methodology in the
  forms of tasks (with templates for different types of
  innovation)
• The tools now reach out and engage the user
  instead of lying in wait, through integration with e-mail and the
  desktop
• The solution has been reorganized by processes and
  tasks as opposed to modules

Why is this important? As many companies are looking to
make product innovation more predictable, using repeatable
best practices is a key element. Hopefully, of course,
they are also looking at their results and putting in place a
continuous improvement process so that standard process can stay
current at the least, and at best help drive new processes into the
organization. 

I look forward to seeing how the new approach will be adopted. Jim
Todhunter and I have different expectations as to the rate of
adoption of the workflow capability, but we both agree that it
provides significant value. At a minimum, it will help Invention
Machine better educate their prospects and customers.

So that’s what I hear from Invention Machine, I hope you found
it useful. Again, there is more to the release that I have not
covered, but to me this is a major step in operationalizing
innovation. What do you think? What else should I have asked
them?