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National Instruments Launches Idea Market
August 8, 2007
National Instruments is a company that thrives on innovation, starting from the very early days when James Truchard challenged co-founder Jeff Kodosky to create software that would do for engineers what the spreadsheet had done for financial types.
The result: LabView, an engineering tool that has several hundred thousand users in industry and academia. About 2,400 of those LabView users converged on Austin this week for NI Week, an unabashed celebration of engineering innovation.
To promote innovation from within, NI has started “The Idea Market” for its 1,200 researchers worldwide.
Tim Dehne, who heads up the R&D organization, said the Web site works like a stock market. Engineers get money (play money, not the real green), and buy or sell the stock of an idea posted on the site.
“If a person thinks he has a good idea, he posts it on the site and, at the least, gets people who also think it is a good idea to bid up that idea’s stock. Sometimes the company buys out an idea to turn it into a real thing,” said Dehne.
The site is in the early going, but one idea has been adopted. Dehne declined to provide details, saying the idea deals with ways to improve the software testing process within NI.
“Developers want to develop software, not spend all their time testing code,” he said, adding that most of the ideas thus far have been “incremental ways of improving our company processes. Nothing earth shaking, but the site just kicked off and we are doing trial runs now.”
Kodosky wowed the NI Week audience with ideas about how engineers at some future date might use LabView’s graphical programming concepts to create system diagrams that would replace the pencil-and-paper diagrams that most engineers use today.
“We are still at the early stage, but the idea is to use these insanely good GPUs (graphical processors) so we can configure a behavioral specification that is flexible like a white board, but where the elements are rigorously defined so they actually work,” Kodosky said.
Posted by David Lammers on August 8, 2007 | Comments (0)
