As smart technologies proliferate in the modern world, the industry is experiencing a widening gap between coming up with ideas and having the ability to execute them.
"If we look at product innovation across the electronics industry and across all markets, we see trend where complexity of product design goes through the roof," Dr. Erik H. Volkerink, chief technology officer of Flextronics, told EBN in an interview. "The tools are not keeping pace. That growing gap is causing a lot of challenges, while time to market pressures is paramount. Fundamentally, a different paradigm is required for product innovation."
Dr. Erik H. Volkerink, CTO, Flextronics.
Today, Volkerink will present a keynote on this topic at the Silicon Valley Open Innovation Summit, being held in conjunction with EE Live!, being held in San Jose. The talk, titled Accelerating Product Innovation: Solving Complexity and Productivity Gap, hopes to propose a new approach to product innovation.
As the electronics industry moves from the old school analog past, through its current digital approach to a market that is focused almost solely on smart products, the approach that designers take needs to evolve too, Volkerink believes. "Smart products are really about putting more intelligence in products," he added, pointing to the adaptability, context awareness, location awareness, and networkability of these devices. "It adds a tremendous amount of complexity for engineers."
To maintain and accelerate the speed of innovation, the electronics industry needs to move from a system of closed innovation to one of open innovation, Volkerink said. "We can go deeper with product innovations if we have building blocks in key areas: sensors and actuators, human machine interface, connectivity, semiconductors, smart software, flexible technologies, and battery and power," he added.
