Design:
- What rose gold means.
- Caterpillar's design for more sustainable, energy-efficient heavy equipment was accomplished outside of Caterpillar's formal lines. A great example of innovation from within - run by the workers themselves, not a department head.
Roadmapping the Future:
- Engineering foods that can survive future climate conditions.
- Perhaps no one is helping us get to a dystopian food future faster than Hormel (of SPAM fame). After acquiring companies like Skippy (peanut butter), Applegate (organic meat) and Muscle Milk (god knows what, really) they are still "hungry for growth" and developing products for something called SPAM Snacks, with "proprietary dried meat technology" It's the same old model of inventing contrary to customer desires and then marketing aggressively that has been hurting the bottom line of other food processing megacorporations.
- UPS is engaging with 3D printing, testing out new services and part fulfillment - in part because it doesn't know what impact additive manufacturing could have on it's current advantages in logistics and distribution. That lack of understanding or vision doesn't bode well for their efforts in an extremely fast moving space.
Building Things:
- Since everyone assumed vinyl record production would fade away to nothing, the pressing equipment used to make records is hard to come by. Factories are hacking together their own solutions, making repairs and custom built parts to keep production going.
- First their crowdfunding platform- now Etsy is getting into the manufacturing business.
- More and more companies are taking India seriously as a manufacturing center.
Bias and Brains:
- Why is it that futurists can imagine robots, flying cars and automated kitchens, but not a world of gender equality or fluidity?
More next week.