Yet again we are taking the trip across the “Pond” to Orlando, Florida for the PDMA, 34th Annual Global Conference on Product Innovation Management.
The conference did not officially start for most people until the Monday but our Account Manager, Karen Shotliff was attending the Global Leadership Forum for PDMA Chapters and Affiliates on the Sunday.
Karen is currently developing PDMA Spain under the Southern European Chapter with Paolo Zanenga. “This was a great opportunity to hear from successful chapters like The Netherlands on how to develop quality programmes and create a long lasting network with real value for their members. It’s a long journey but thankfully there is lots of support even coming from PDMA Mexico and Latin America, hopefully we can all meet again soon.”
Luckily it was not all work, we managed to take the time to go to Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure where there were many rollercoaster’s like The Hulk, Doctor Doom and Spiderman. These are not for the faint hearted but we did go on them quite a few times once we got our land legs back!
The newest part to the park was Harry Potter Land and it really was magical. The talking paintings and the Sorting Hat were amazing, and a certain person who shall remain nameless could have stayed all day.
To start off we attended a panel on a study of Top Tools for Breakthrough Innovation by Dr. Gina O’Conner, Associate Professor of the Renssealer Polytechnic Institute with Brenda Tollet, Innovation Director of Ashland Inc and Mike Hess from Medtronic. All interesting perspectives especially from Brenda Tollet regarding how companies should have a unified language of innovation and that there should be a corporate mandate to commercialize and develop breakthrough innovation by targeting the right people who are the best at what they do within the company.
Another session that was popular with most of the crowd at PDMA was Dan Pink, author of “Drive” which analyzes motivation over the perspective of science. He shared with us that over the years there have been many experiments for analyzing the importance of commissions in the solution of problems, and the conclusion was that incentives don’t really work with heuristic tasks (creative work). On our behalf it’s great to see that our vision on incentives is aligned with the latest trends!
We’d also like to point out the work IPEX has been doing in product development management, making it clear that the benefits of using an innovation process can be leveraged by others than just large enterprises.
In between the 3 days of the conference we met some interesting people like Gert Staal of PDMA Netherlands, Steve Smolinksy, Allan Anderson of Massey Engineering, Veronica of PDMA Central America and Gabriel of Continental Disc Corporation. Thanks to all these guys and many more for making this a great event.
We hope to see you all very soon!
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To follow on about the great people we met in Orlando at the PDMA event we have to say a big thank you to Steve Smolinsky who has become a great champion of INOGATE and here is our reply to his blog:
