Bengt-Olof Elfström

The design of functional (total care) products

Total Care Products (Functional Products) are integrated systems comprising hardware and support services. The Functional Product supplier provides all the support systems that are required to keep the hardware operable. The support systems are often referred to as ‘services’. The success of Total Care Products depends upon both hardware and services. Well established methods exist for the design of hardware. In comparison, design processes and methods for services are not so well developed. This paper is concerned with the definition and design of functional Products, in particular design of services in the context of Total Care Products. Literature from the service sector is reviewed exten-sively to identify the principal components of service design. The information required for the execution of each component of the process, and outputs of each component, are considered with respect to the design of Total Care Products. Of particular interest is the customer-supplier relationship throughout the design process. The design of a Total Care Product may involve the creation of a new service system or there may be an existing system that may be adapted or developed. Similarly, hardware may be mature or be a completely new product. There are therefore number of permutations of novelty and maturity in the hardware and service components of a new Total Care Product. The design processes and methods employed must take into account the required degree of novelty in each component. Typically a customer will be given a guarantee of a certain level of availability of the Total Care Product. This brings into sharp focus the reliability and maintainability of the total system. Further research directions in Total Care Product design are identified especially related to functional reliability.

Measuring R&D productivity: complementing the picture by focusing on research activities

Abstract To stay competitive in an ever-changing environment, companies have to continuously increase the productivity of their R&D resources. To make this increase in productivity possible, the productivity must be measured. Most research so far has focused on measuring R&D as a whole, but with relatively little success. The conclusions drawn from this paper are that previous research has failed due to two main problems. Firstly, esearch activities differ from development activities regarding a number of factors, factors that play important roles in measuring productivity. Thus, research activities must be measured separately, to ensure that the factors are correctly considered. Secondly, the view of what the expected output from a company’s research activities is varies from company to company, as well as with external factors like changing customer demands and developments in the market. Thus, to measure the research activity, managers first have to define what the expected output from the research activities is and then adopt a measurement system that fits the current situation.

BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN UNIVERSITY AND INDUSTRY: THREE MECHANISMS FOR INNOVATION EFFICIENCY

A key challenge for competence networking is the difficulty of contextual understanding between people from different organizations. Despite close collaboration, full insight into a company is difficult, although desirable, for university partners to achieve and vice versa. The case study described in this paper is of a company with long experience of university–industry collaboration. The paper reports on a designerly approach to overcome barriers of university–industry collaboration. The approach is combined with strategic, tactic and operational dimensions. It builds on three corresponding mechanisms: a tool to facilitate strategic understanding, workshops to facilitate tactical co-creation, and prototyping to facilitate operational ideation.

Making Cross-company Information Available in the Conceptual Phase

In new business-to-business relations within the aerospace industry, companies join together in partnership to perform product development, taking full responsibility for their product during its entire life cycle. This paper describes a method on how these downstream effects can be simulated in a cross-company collaborative situation. A case study was conducted where a jet engine component manufacturer and a tool manufacturer used each other’s expertise in a collaborative approach to make “holes” in a jet engine component. Ten conceptual jet engine frames were collaboratively evaluated within two working days. The distributed engineering environment creates a new situation for the partnership companies by allowing them to work efficiently within the activities that have been incorporated into the distributed engineering environment. Downstream effects of the overall system can then be evaluated already in the conceptual phase, thus allowing the partners to design the life cycle properties of their common product.