Wohlers Report Gives the Whole Story on AM/3D Printing
For the 17th year in a row, Wohlers Associates, Inc. has published its global industry analysis of additive manufacturing (AM) and 3D printing. It’s hard to believe that the AM/3D printing industry has been something worth reporting on since 1995. And it’s even more amazing that Terry Wohlers, creator of the Wohlers Report, has been involved in the business for more than two decades. Read full article »
Can 140 Characters Really Change the World?
If the right person enters Dassault Systèmes’ new “IF WE Challenge,” one tweet could change the world for the better. Any individual (not a company) can share his or her world-changing dream by submitting a 140-character statement—in English and starting with “#IFWE”. You can also enter via Twitter, Facebook, etc., but the official contest page is the easiest way to learn about it. Read full article »
Creativity Grows on TRIZ
In 1949, Genrich Altshuller, an idealistic Soviet naval patent inspector, sent a paper he had co-authored to the Soviet premier. In it, he outlined a method of product innovation that he believed would help the Soviet Union rebuild after the twin disasters of Stalin’s first “Pogrom” and World War II. Stalin thanked the aspiring naval officer by sentencing him to 25 years in an Arctic labor camp.
Altshuller and his Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, or TRIZ (pronounced “trees”) as it’s more commonly known by its Russian acronym, could easily have perished in the gulag. But he kept himself and many of his companions alive by partaking nightly of an intellectual feast, learning everything from art history to physics from his fellow prisoners.





