ShareThisAt PDMA’s Global Conference on Product Innovation Management this October 16-20th in Orlando, FL, we’ve continued the tradition from last year and included our “Technology Showcase.”
The Technology Showcase is an on-site marketplace of new ideas and pre-commercialized emerging technologies that are experiential and have a huge “WOW” factor. The Showcase will be incorporated into the conference program so attendees can learn from and interact with the innovations that will be helping to shape our future. Our goal is to engage in a way that both amazes and provides useful insights into innovative solutions and opportunities that might apply to business today.
Highlighted Technology Showcase Participant of the week: Virtual Runway and Black Dress Design Studio
Virtual Runway and Black Dress Design Studio represent our innovative solutions for manufacturing and merchandising within the apparel industry. The work began in 2005, with an initial exposure to a virtual world platform that allowed users to create their own content in a 3D, immersive, collaborative space.
That initial exposure was pure serendipity – exploring for personal interest, not because they thought they could use it to develop a revolutionary 3D product offering for apparel. But because of past experience in developing apparel and accessories for the big box retailers, they recognized the value in using these simple 3D capabilities for the apparel industry, which is very limited in its technical solutions for product development.
The apparel industry is the last trillion dollar industry that has been left largely untouched by the large technology companies. The reason the large technology companies have not been able to penetrate the apparel industry is actually rather simple. In order for IT professionals to create effective technology solutions, they have to be able to extract user requirements from the actual users. In this case the fashion designer users do not have the same vocabulary as the IT professionals. In other words, fashion designers and IT professionals do not speak the same language, regardless of whether they share a common mother language. Because of this there was no way that domain extraction could historically be accomplished.
One of the most innovative efforts in developing Virtual Runway and Black Dress Design Studio was to complete a formal process of business process and workflow extraction with IBM. With Black Dress Design Studio and Virtual Runway, they are engaged in business process re-engineering at a deep, intrinsic level using simple 3D modeling capability in an immersive collaborative space.
See other Technology Showcase Participants
Do you have a technology that you’d like to see at the annual PDMA technology showcase? For more information or to submit your innovative technology, e-mail pdmatechshowcase@gmail.com
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