Early in my career, as part of a corporate culture exercise, I was introduced to the nine-dot problem. By now almost anyone connected with R&D or innovation has seen it. The challenge is to connect nine dots organized as a grid, using only four lines, without lifting your pencil. The group that I was part of for this exercise was an artificial intelligence lab, and the members seemed to be more driven to challenge the boundaries of the puzzle than to solve it. Most people solved the four-line version rather quickly. Then someone declared that he could do it with three lines (taking advantage of the large dimensions of the dots on the puzzle to skew lines through their edges); someone else claimed he could solve the puzzle with one line and did so by making a cylinder of the playing board and using a slightly askew line circling many times around the cylinder to hit all the dots; finally, someone said he could solve it with zero lines (one point) and folded the paper so that all the dots aligned, one above the other. He stabbed the stack of dots. Done!

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Jim Euchner, From the Editor, Vol 61.5

Give ordinary people the right tools, and they will design and build the most extraordinary things.

—Neil Gershenfeld

The Internet of Things (IoT) has taken on many meanings. In manufacturing, it means instrumenting and informating factories so that data can be used to improve quality and productivity. In logistics, it means a unique identifier for individual items so that supply chains can be made more intelligent. In new product development, it means the development of smart, connected products that provide information about their state so that information can be used to improve the operations the products support. It can also mean the use of information to broaden the traditional design space for a product. Finally, for manufacturers, IoT means the proliferation of data-based business models, especially those that sell products as services.

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