"Does it make the boat go faster?"

Peter Blake and Team New Zealand may appear to have nothing to do with manufacturing, but the approach they took to winning the America's Cup has everything to do with it.

For decades, industrial software has largely been a game of bigger platforms, bigger implementations and bigger budgets. The assumption has often been that solving interoperability means replacing everything or standardising on a single vendor.

Peter Blake didn't win the America's Cup by outspending anyone. He won it by asking a better question.

Their entire campaign was driven by one deceptively simple question — a question that shaped every design decision, every engineering trade-off, and ultimately helped them defeat teams with far greater resources: does it make the boat go faster?

We believe that same philosophy is just as relevant to manufacturing today as it was to winning the America's Cup.

On 4 August, Thred joined CESMII and the Manufacturing Leadership Council for Scaling Smart Manufacturing: The Interoperability Forum — a free virtual event built around one stubborn problem. We demonstrated live alongside leaders from GE Appliances, General Mills, Toyota North America and dozens of other technology providers.

Watch below to find out Sir Peter Blake's philosophy has far more to teach us about interoperability than you might expect.