I recently had the opportunity to speak with Erkki Kiviniemi, Technical Manager of Sovella, about their recent GrabCAD challenge. Sovella received 97 designs in less than a month and had to select the 10 "best".
Lauri: Why did you choose to organize a Challenge on GrabCAD?
Erkki: We hadn't previously tried a crowd sourcing engineering method, so this was new for us and we decided to give it a try.
Lauri: What do you think about this approach to solving engineering problems using a community-centered contest?
Erkki: This approach allows us to interact with huge numbers of engineers who are interesting in submitting their ideas. Also, posting a challenge to GrabCAD gives us a large amount of positive publicity both with the engineers on GrabCAD and outside through various news stories/blogs etc.
Of course, this approach must be handled carefully. It is not always the best method if a company is developing something highly proprietary or which is not reasonable to reveal to competitors in any form.
Lauri: Are you satisfied with the results of your GrabCAD competition?
Erkki: Yes we are; we received many more proposals what we expected. With all these designs we can now be confident that we have enough practical ideas from which to draw.
Lauri: What would have been the alternative if you would not have had the Challenge?
Erkki: Perhaps we would have done a study in a technical college or we would just have used our own personnel, which is always priority matter.
Lauri: What is the biggest problem for you with regards to engineering within your company?
Erkki: There is always much more to do than recourses available; I believe this is the situation in every technical department in every company.
Lauri: How many in-house engineers you have?
Erkki: It is difficult to quote exact figures, because our numbers vary; according to engineering demand we use technical people from other departments in our company and also use external engineering offices.
Lauri: What will you do with the winning works of the competition now?
Erkki: With these designs, we will wait for the right time to start the internal design work, during which we plan to use winning models as a base. We're confident that now we have good base from which to start.
Lauri: What do you think about GrabCAD?
Erkki: From a customer point of view, GrabCAD has worked well.
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Thank you Sovella, thank you community. Another great challenge. Congratulations again to the winners and we look forward to potentially hosting another Sovella challenge in the future. You can see all of the current challenges to start working on a design today!
Cheers,
Lauri
http://grabcad.com/lauri.poldre