Disruptive Technologies and Robust Optimization

Disruptive Technologies are all around us:  Web meetings instead of teleconferences or face to face meetings, JPEG files instead of photographs, Wikipedia instead of encyclopedias.  Some are evolutionary, in that they evolve from an existing technology and some are revolutionary, in that they take a giant leap forward and provide a useful function in a totally new way.

Disruptive technologies can make a big difference in the revenues of fledgling companies or Fortune 500 companies, but they can also cause undue pain and costs in taking a great idea from the back of a napkin to a mass production success.

Robust Optimization can make this transition from an idea on the back of a napkin, to a working concept and finally to a high volume manufacturing success a whole lot easier with less costs and reduced ‘time to market’.  The general approach is that a concept (whether it is a product or a process) needs to be better than all of the other similar or hybridized concepts, meaning that it can be compared, quantitatively, to all of the other concepts.  Once the best concept is identified, it can then be “polished” or made the best that it can be by optimizing all of its functions.  By doing this, development costs and ‘time to market’ can be greatly reduced which can result in larger and faster revenues.

Yeah, I know this sound like a lot of scientific and engineering mumbo-jumbo, but it really works and I have seen it firsthand.  As the saying goes, “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet”, but you don’t have to break more than you need to make a great omelet that people are willing to pay for.