This month, General Electric’s health-care division will begin marketing a first-of-its-kind electrocardiograph machine in the U.S. It will retail for 80% less than products with similar capabilities. But what really distinguishes the MAC 800 is its lineage. The machine is basically the same field model that GE Healthcare developed for doctors in India and China in 2008.It exemplifies a way of thinking that may be ideally suited to dealing with the widening recession: creating entry-level goods for emerging markets and then quickly and cheaply repackaging them for sale in rich nations, where customers are increasingly hungry for bargains.

The term for this new approach is “trickle-up innovation”, and it is turning conventional product development on its head.

Read more here.

While innovation talks about metrics and tangible features, design is usually defined by intuition and intangibles. It is far easier to explain metrics and tangibles than it is “look and feel.” It is also assumed to be safer to make decisions based on numbers and engineering calculations.Yet the core question about design is not “is it a ‘good’ design?”; it’s the other question: “is it the ‘right’ design?”

Read more about how the term “innovation” has been misunderstood and what it means for your products here.

In 2006, when Dana Nickerson arrived at Whirlpool Corporation, the US$18 billion home appliance maker, he found its product development system hampered by an engineering problem that plagues many large corporations: the inability to find comprehensive data on the parts that go into the company’s thousands of products. That deficiency, in turn, affected the company’s ability to develop new products and get them to market quickly. Nickerson, whose job as Whirlpool’s director of global business process management for corporate technology was to rationalize the management of parts data, compares the situation to having a version of Google Earth that zooms down only as far as the country level. “We had no more visibility into our product information than that,” he says. “What we realized was that we couldn’t use what we couldn’t find.”

Most manufacturers have the same problem. Without structured, easily accessible data models that can integrate information from disparate sources, there is no opportunity to reuse parts or to gain insight from design or test data. Those drawbacks can cripple the design process, especially as it becomes more globally distributed and outsourced.

The article, here, describes Whirlpool’s solutions.