Everyone wants to innovate. No one wants to change. Innovation without Execution is only Ideation.

The progression of an enterprise needs the correct understanding of invention, innovation, entrepreneurship, and business savviness. At Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO), we typically characterize invention as a singular activity whereas innovation requires collaboration. Beyond innovation is entrepreneurship where the drive is to scale up and try to monetize. Over the years of working in the Aerospace, Automotive, Manufacturing and the CPG domains, we have assimilated a series of tenets and best practices that enable the themed creation of products and services.

THE BASIS

Innovation in the new requires a holistic understanding of all moving parts in an enterprise. It means that people, processes, and technology must come together in new ways to enable the company to reach its goals. A company that wants to innovate must have a clear understanding of what it wants to achieve and how it plans to get there. There are four main types of innovation:

1. Process Innovation: This type of innovation refers to changes or improvements made to the way a company does business. This could involve changes to the way products are made, delivered, or sold.

2. Product Innovation: This type of innovation involves creating new products or improving existing ones. This could involve changes to the design, functionality, or quality of a product.

3. Business Model Innovation: This type of innovation involves changes to the way a company does business. This could involve changes to the way products are made, delivered, or sold.

4. Organizational Innovation: This type of innovation involves changes to the structure or culture of a company. This could involve changes to the way decisions are made, or the way work is organized.
   

Herewith we discuss innovation and the future of making incorporating the four above types in our four-pronged approach of creating products and services in the new paradigm. MANTHAN^TM for Innovation defines our design techniques with a curriculum-based approach for ideation, design, and product development.

In a prior article on Innovating the Future, we had described our design philosophy that will provide the basis for the art of the possible using the science for engineering by incorporating new technology, material composites, parametric and generative design techniques combined with a collaborative and agile methodology for doing. It will draw on natural sciences, intellectual history and 21st century technology to identify environments conductive to innovation by facilitating brainstorming of solutions. It will build a connected synthetic ecosystem of people, processes and platforms that enables collaboration, co-creation, and ideation. Thus, the process to make, manage, move, market, and maintain will be themed and pragmatic to build smart and connected solutions of the future.

Even as technology advances, good design remains a distinctly human endeavor – one that begins with a spark of creativity and is nurtured by way of a disciplined, iterative process that provides a path to innovation and progress. We define the ascension of product creation in 3 steps:

Imagine – Tomorrow’s products and solutions are a blend of the physical product, its mechanical capabilities and electronic componentry and its capabilities of being connected and smart. Because of new technologies, today’s designers are able to imagine new and better possibilities. Innovating such products requires imagination of a diverse set of expertise ideating together in a collaborative environment to iteratively achieve results.

Design – Commonly used design software lacks the ability to design mechanical systems that are not bound by a physical space or constraint. With the vast potential offered in all aspects of digital engineering, we can change even the most basic assumptions of the development process and re-shape them into a form in which they can be used in various applications and manufacturing industries (called design for manufacturability or DFM).

For example, one can take a set of requirements that would normally be expressed as a set of constraints on a physical system. When interpreted through the digital lens, these constraints become rules on creating new geometry in continuous or discrete space. These conventions of continuous geometry can then be extended.

Engineering companies are changing the way we design mechanical systems. Until today, most design software is limited by physical constraints, and they can only allow one to create something within a given three-dimensional space. We believe that with the help of digital technology, we can redefine our designs beyond the limitations of three-dimensionality and bring mechanical engineering to an entirely new level. In order to provide knowledge support for this paradigm shift, we have created tools for designing mechanical systems in the form of mathematical meta models and algorithms.

Create – Using additive manufacturing or 3D printing we can develop complex components faster and cheaper. By modeling, designing, and simulating the part functionality using digital engineering tools, mathematical concepts and simulation results could be merged to create an optimized design ready to be fabricated.

THE METHODOLOGY

MANTHAN^TM – A Design Philosophy for Innovation that combines modernistic design concepts with:

• Strategic Intent,
• Story Telling,
• Design Thinking,
• Adaptive Engineering,
• Systems Engineering and
• Design for Manufacturability

to enable ideation and the creation of intentional prototypes driven by customer expectations. It will also account for the governance and change management of the product lifecycle thru design iterations, design for manufacturing, and for it eventually becoming a sellable product.

Our Design Philosophy MANTHAN^TM will provide the basis for the art of the possible using the science of engineering by incorporating new technology, material composites, parametric and generative design techniques combined with a collaborative and agile methodology for doing. It will draw on natural sciences, intellectual history and 21st century technology to identify environments conductive to innovation by facilitating brainstorming of solutions. It will build a connected ecosystem of people, processes and platforms that enables collaboration, co-creation, and ideation. Thus, the process to make, manage, move, and maintain will be themed and pragmatic to build smart and connected solutions of the future.

As we seek quantifiable parallels across these diverse systems, we ask:

• Where does novelty come from?
• What are the factors and the processes that come together to create innovations?

The word MANTHAN literally means “churning”, and other meanings may be deep contemplation, assimilation of facts, analysis aimed at a solution or conclusion. In our context we will refer to it as a new way of brain storming melding Strategic Intent with Story Telling, Design Thinking, Systems Engineering and Design for Manufacturability. We will use the tenets of hard tech to enable designing future products and services in conjunction with building an ecosystem to make it happen.

MANTHAN^TM helps build a connected ecosystem of people, processes and platforms that enables collaboration, co-creation, and ideation. Thus, the process to make, manage, move, market, and maintain will be themed and pragmatic to build smart and connected solutions of the future. The basis of Manthan’s philosophy is a detailed curriculum shown in the diagram above. It consists of a four-stage maturity model defined by the steps:

• STEP 1 IDEATION – Ideation is the process where you generate ideas and solutions. Mentally it represents a process of ‘going wide’ in terms of concepts and outcomes. Ideation provides both the fuel and also the source material for building prototypes and getting innovative solutions into the hands of your users. It will be comprised of Intention, Inception, Composition and Collaboration.
• STEP 2 SOLUTIONING (from which solutions are derived) – Solutioning or Project Management helps to give the right structure to the application, the right architecture, the right design, and the right features. It is a progression on “knowing” and will be made up of Conceptualization, Progression, Gear-up and Managing Complexity.
• STEP 3 REALIZATION – Realization will have Prototyping, Emergent Tech, Ascension, and Sustenance. Realization is the future of Business Intelligence and will be a key part of successful implementation of the Analytics Infrastructure.
• STEP 4 UTILIZATION – Utilization is the final step in innovation and the progression to Commercialization. and will contain MVP definition, Futuring, Cadence and Harmonization.

We have detailed each of the cells described in the diagram in our Tenets section (Innovate) and will be utilizing it to materialize our first concept products in the mobility space.

PROTOTYPE VS MVP

It’s apples vs oranges. A prototype is the outcome of an invention, whereas an MVP is a product that a customer would pay for? Both are critical to the product development process.

Prototypes enable removing the kinks in the product/solution before the customer interacts with it. Since it is is one of a kind, costs related to prototype build should be properly assessed in the product development cycle. Also, since 80% of the cost related to new product development is determined in building prototypes, it is important to get this correct and fast, else we end with what is termed as prototype purgatory, an allegory to Dante’s vision of hell. With Additive manufacturing techniques like 3D printing, the process of prototyping can be greatly optimized to enable correct design and feasibility.

MVPs though should follow a cadence of progression aka a master plan with every subsequent revision adding to existing features (or in most cases unlocking them) so that the customers are always excited about the new features that are unveiled. An example of this would be Tesla’s online firmware updates that fix bugs and add existing features to the cars auto driving capabilities. Of course, sometime this would need hardware updates as in case of Tesla when it moved from AP0 to AP1 (Mobileye) to AP2 (NVidia) to AP3 (its own full self-driving GPU chip). But in each instance, there was a magnitude upgrade to functions and features.

Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO)’s MANTHAN^TM Design Innovation framework (check link in comment) facilitates such a progression and if correctly impememented will enable companies to retain customers and also have them be the advocate to market the company’s brand.

Summary

The importance of design in innovation cannot be underestimated. But there needs to be a correspondence with product development and manufacturability – a sort of fluidity that Franz von Holzhausen at Tesla and his prior designs at @Mazda assert that makes every concept a candidate for production.

The progression of an enterprise needs the correct understanding of invention, innovation, entrepreneurship, and business savviness. Voice of the customer is key, and it is necessary to adopt a customer centric view to all intentions. At Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO), we start by setting a strong basis for innovation by defining our design philosophy MANTHAN^TM that steps through the Imagine-Design-Create process to turn concepts to realities with basis.  MANTHAN^TM is our first of four tenets to enable customer-centric new product development and solutioning, optimal process management in smart manufacturing, robust and appropriate integration of enterprise systems and their interaction with 3^rd party services, and the orchestration of multi-modal datasets of trained neural net models for actionable intelligence.

Amidst the skewed distribution and use of people, process, and technology in today’s enterprises, MANTHAN^TM proposes a direction to shift this imbalance towards people by bringing them in as process boundaries, appropriate use of tools to reduce technical debt and using customer insight feedback loops to align with human-need, desires, and aspirations. This is appropriate as we progress thru our industrial revolutions from Industry 4.0 (smart manufacturing) to Industry and Services 5.0 (human-centric solutions).

Delivering Innovation for us at Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO) is not just about checking the box for Product Development but also following thru the entire lifecycle of the product – up-stream, mid-stream, and down-stream to connect all the dots between the different systems and 3rd party services. This enables Design for Manufacturability considerations, appropriate procurement and supply-chain logistics, financial planning, and customer enablement via themed marketing, sell and support. We use AI/ML driven by Physmatics to appropriately drive and manage processes intelligently and efficiently via our Digital Twine blueprint process.

To achieve this goal, we will be assembling a compelling team, accepting strategic investment, building vendor and industry partnerships to create a portfolio of products and services that is not solely driven by standard measurable KPIs but also by empathy, usability, sensibility, passion, and purpose. Our ambition is to leave a lasting impact on people by creating ROIs that are immeasurable yet invaluable considerations to justify our existence and progression as a company.

NITIN UCHIL Founder, CEO & Technical Evangelist

nitin.uchil@numorpho.com