PTC Builds Partnerships to Advance Pace of Innovation

Partners and the pace of innovation—those were the primary talking points at this week’s LiveWorx 2018 keynote as PTC President and CEO Jim Heppelmann unveiled new industry collaborators along with capabilities in areas from simulation to smart manufacturing designed to advance what Heppelmann called the “new frontier of innovation.”

Heppelmann, who’s been steadily and aggressively steering PTC beyond its 3D design software roots to cutting-edge areas like the Internet of Things (IoT) and augmented reality, said the company is moving fast to enact change in the physical and digital worlds as well as in how humans interact with digital and physical things. PTC is moving its global headquarters to Boston’s Seaport, considered the city’s innovation hub, and as part of its journey, Heppelmann is now touting the PTC acronym not as the original Parametric Technology Corp., but rather as Prepare to Change. That was underlying theme of Heppelmann’s LiveWorx keynote address, driven home by the usual fanfare of human performance artists and a digital laser show.

“Inertia is the main competitor because it’s the enemy of change,” he told the audience. “The world is changing in ways we didn’t anticipate—PTC is ready and willing to make changes happen at a blistering pace.”

In that spirit, Heppelmann made a series of announcements designed to advance PTC’s transformation. On the physical front, he touted fresh capabilities in the newly released Creo 5.0 in areas like additive manufacturing, topology optimization, and simulation. The Creo Topology Optimization Extension, built into the software, automatically creates optimized designs based on a defined set of constraints and parameters. The tool is not only directly accessible in Creo, it automatically creates B-rep geometry from the topology, which can be then be further modified parametrically, streamlining the overall workflow. “No more wasting time to recreate the geometry to match the optimized geometry in an external tool,” Heppelmann explains.