First Thoughts By Dan Gilmore – Editor-in-Chief I am very keen on the subject of supply chain innovation right now, for a variety of reasons. First, CEOs across the globe are putting innovation as the top or near top priority for the companies they run. It’s pretty simple why: innovation is what drives the growth and attractive margins. Supply chain in turn obviously has a key role to play in overall corporate/product innovation. This is perhaps most manifestly seen right now in the Internet of Things and how industrial companies especially are currently or prospectively leveraging IoT to create new priducts and services. Gilmore Says: The Kiva system true innovation, and has ushered in the "goods to picker" concept that is now so prominent in materials handling circles. So, supply chains need to both supoort product innovation, while also innovating in its own domain. But I would argue that supply chain innovation is not well understood. Certainly we don’t have any good ways to measure it. I have been doing some light collaboration on supply chain innovation with Dr. Jim Rice of MIT, who has also been researching this topic. MIT in fact has something it calls the Forum for Supply Chain Innovation, which is doing research in this area, among other activities. Hope to have something more to share from the two of us soon on this, but there are a number of issues to be explored, from defining supply chain innovation, to measuring it, to the difference between innovation and continuous improvement and many more. I am quite excited to be working on these types of questions, which I think will be good for the industry if we can wrestle some of them to the ground. As some readers may remember, back in 2010 I came up with the top […]