Sooner or later in business one will stumble over the fact that “an idea doesn’t care who owns it.” Opportunity, conflict and plenty of work for lawyers can all follow on from there.
This free principle of ideas applies of course to both good and bad ideas – and timing is also everything. Some developments are ahead of their time and will alas be still-born while others wait too long, and opportunity then passes them by.
The trick is to have time and tide meet at just the right moment: And, to date, our new Irish Centre for Manufacturing Research (ICMR) is showing all the signs of a successful launch that is steadily gathering steam.
Barry Kennedy, Chief Executive Officer, is steering the ship and our HeatWorks V Magazine issue contains a full interview with him about the goals of the new ICMR organisation and the progress made to date.
What pleases me most about the new ICMR is that is committed to a long overdue awakening of all the natural innovation and manufacturing talent that is already under our noses here in all corners of Ireland: Barry’s terms for this activity include ‘mapping tacit knowledge’ and ‘encouraging translational research’.
In other words, our manufacturing companies ‘know much more than they know’. Our new ICMR project now gives us the opportunity to unleash the power of this know-how and to communicate it to all our manufacturing enterprises, large and small.
As said – an idea really doesn’t care who owns it: Performance metrics and continuous improvement techniques such as Six Sigma, Kaizen, Can-Ban, OTIF, OEE and many others are available for successful translation into businesses at any time. Ceramicx, of course, is a founding member of the ICMR.
In particular we feel we have a clear role and talents to use helping bring the message to small to medium enterprises (SMEs); helping them to understand and apply the power of ideas; some of which will play out in quite a different way to the process in larger enterprises.
It’s a two way street: SMEs are more than capable of generating original first principles and great new ideas that can be of valuable worth to larger organisations. After all, everything started out small once.
Our new ICMR now gives our manufacturers a dedicated place in which to communicate and share the power of ideas to a point of optimum use and take-up. At Ceramicx – the infrared heat consultants – we are committed to advancing this work. Indeed, we look forward to seeing it catch fire over the coming months.
Tony’s article will pick up the baton in relation to the fundamentals of 
