Enhancing Product Innovation with Computational Engineering

S ilicon Valley is the home of many of the most innovative high-technology industries that have ever existed, and their level of innovation gives them a competitive economic advantage that sustains a significant portion of the US economy. While there have been dozens of attempts in the US and abroad to replicate this success, few have been very successful. A relatively new approach to product development, computational engineering,1 is based on the use of computing, especially high-performance computing, to design, construct, and analyze virtual prototypes of new products. Because this new approach intrinsically shares many of the operational characteristics of Silicon Valley companies—including small, highly skilled product development teams that are empowered to take risks, make decisions, and accept failure on the path to success (see Figure 1)—it isn’t surprising that the application of computational engineering can achieve levels of operational success similar to Silicon Valley companies, which exhibit high levels of product innovation, short times to market, highquality product designs, and high customer appeal.2 Many high-tech industries are achieving product innovation by employing computational engineering. For instance, the automobile industry improves the crash worthiness of its products by modeling crashes using high-performance computing simulation models for vehicle crashes.3 Goodyear uses physicsbased models of tire performance to reduce its time to market and to increase the annual number of new products.4 Ping Golf models the interaction of its golf clubs with golf balls to maximize the effectiveness of its clubs.5 Integrated circuit manufacturers model their new integrated circuits to maximize performance, reduce power consumption, and minimize defects.6 The value of computational engineering is described in many reports by the Aberdeen Group (www.aberdeen.com) and the Council on Competitiveness (www.compete.org). A comparison of the two cultures identifies many common features between them: