Benoit Weil

Teaching innovative design reasoning: How concept???knowledge theory can help overcome fixation effects

Abstract How can we prepare engineering students to work collectively on innovative design issues, involving ill-defined, “wicked” problems? Recent works have emphasized the need for students to learn to combine divergent and convergent thinking in a collaborative, controlled manner. From this perspective, teaching must help them overcome four types of obstacles or “fixation effects” (FEs) that are found in the generation of alternatives, knowledge acquisition, collaborative creativity, and creativity processes. We begin by showing that teaching based on concept–knowledge (C-K) theory can help to manage FEs because it helps to clarify them and then to overcome them by providing means of action. We show that C-K theory can provide scaffolding to improve project-based learning (PBL), in what we call project-based critical learning (PBCL). PBCL helps students be critical and give due thought to the main issues in innovative design education: FEs. We illustrate the PBCL process with several cases and show precisely where the FEs appear and how students are able to overcome them. We conclude by discussing two main criteria of any teaching method, both of which are usually difficult to address in situations of innovative design teaching. First, can the method be evaluated? Second, is the chosen case “realistic” enough? We show that C-K-based PBCL can be rigorously evaluated by teachers, and we discuss the circumstances in which a C-K-based PBCL may or may not be realistic.

The Interplay between Creativity Issues and Design Theories: A New Perspective for Design Management Studies?

In this article, we analyse the relationship between creativity issues and design theory. Although these two notions seem to correspond to different academic fields (psychology, cognitive science and management for creativity; engineering science and logic for design theory), they appear to be deeply related when it comes to design methods and management. Analysing three historical moments in design theory building (the 1850s, with the ratio method for industrial upgrading in Germany, the 20th century with systematic design, and the 1920s with the Bauhaus theory), we point to the dialectical interplay that links creativity and design theory, structured around the notion of ‘fixation effect’: creativity identifies fixation effects, which become the targets of new design theories; design theories invent models of thought to overcome them; and, in turn, these design theories can also create new fixation effects that will then be designated by creativity studies. This dialectical interplay leads to regular inventions of new ways of managing design, i.e., new ways of managing knowledge, processes and organizations for design activities. We use this framework to analyse recent trends in creativity and design theories.

An organizational change perspective on the value of modeling

Abstract The modeling activity is central to management science practice since it can facilitate the systematic investigation of problems and issues faced by organizations. In this paper we argue that management science modeling can also initiate significant organizational change, even in the absence of a successful implementation. We categorize these changes as (1) knowledge creation and dissemination; and (2) altered coordination and communication patterns. We illustrate our points using numerous examples and two brief cases, one American and one French. Both cases are successful implementations, but both also provide additional, identifiable benefits that can be linked to the notion of organizational change. We conclude with a set of recommendations for the modeler.

Platforms for the design of platforms: collaborating in the unknown

This chapter explores how industry platforms can be designed using specific collaborative relationships that also take the form of platforms.

The role of design regimes in the coordination of competencies and the conditions for inter-firm cooperation

More and more work is being done on cooperative design operations in which collective learning processes are closely related to product dynamics. Coordination models conveyed by project management, modularity and platform strategies are also being designed with the aim of improving inter-firm coordination. This paper shows that these models are based on restrictive hypotheses in terms of knowledge and the design function. By studying concrete design functions, we demonstrate the need to differentiate between the different design regimes, which we characterise by three product-related aspects knowledge, breakdown into sub-units and the objectives prescribed to the different sub-units. We then go on to examine three different design regimes, namely for new products with a stabilised architecture, common semi-designed products and innovative products. This analytical framework serves to demonstrate that coordination mechanisms between firms involved in a joint development or innovation process must be adapted to the design regime in question, and therefore helps us establish a number of conditions required for inter-firm cooperation.

Platform Emergence in Double Unknown (Technology, Markets): Common Unknown Strategy

The proposed chapter deals with platform emergence in double unknown situations when technology and markets are highly uncertain. The interest in technological platform development to enable creation of products and processes that support present and future development of multiple options is widely recognized by practitioners and academics. The existing literature considers that platforms already invented and the development is mostly based on exploiting this common platform core to build future markets and technological derivatives. However, when we are in double unknown situations, markets and technologies are highly uncertain and neither market options, nor platform cores are known. Thus, how to start an exploration? How can one ensure platform emergence in double unknown? What are the market and technology conditions that lead to different strategies of platform emergence? To answer these questions, we formally describe identified strategies and fabricate simple economical model to compare them. We illustrate the insights of the model through a case study of innovative technology development in semiconductor industry. Our results allow for better understanding market and technological conditions that allow for minimization of risks and exploration costs in double unknown and exploration costs in double unknown. Following the principle of value creation across various applications, this work extends the comprehension of generic technology design in double unknown.

Industry-wide technology roadmapping in double unknown — The case of the semiconductor industry

Many companies face today a dilemma of “double unknown” when deciding where to put their research dollars: ignorance of which one among many possible technologies is most likely to emerge and similar ignorance of which one among many possible applications will most likely be a driver for the technology. Generic technologies are widely recognized to be beneficial for various market applications ([Bresnahan, Trajtenberg, 1995]; [Maine, Garsney, 2006]) and recent research results show that double unknown can lead companies to organize design activity to develop generic technologies suitable for several emerging markets application [Kokshagina, et al. 2012a]. However, the investigations so far focused on the level of the individual firm, while a “double unknown” situation is typically characterizing an industrial sector as a whole. This is in particular the case of the semiconductor industry: While the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) primary focus has been and still is the continuation of Moores law, it introduced recently the “More than Moore” concept, to account for technologies which do not necessarily follow the CMOS miniaturization trends, and represent a growing part of the total silicon-based semiconductor market. The sheer diversity of both those technologies and their potential applications renders a roadmapping exercise very challenging. Nevertheless, given the benefits that roadmapping has brought to the semiconductor industry, the International Roadmap Committee (IRC) of the ITRS has decided to extend its activities to this new field. Which strategies do the ITRS experts implement to select which technologies to roadmap and which applications to target in double unknown? In this paper, we show that to design roadmaps for More than Moore technologies, the ITRS experts apply a strategy of “common unknown” [Kokshagina, et al. 2012a], along with additional community building activities specific to the situation of inter-firm collaboration.

Gambling versus Designing: Organizing for the Design of the Probability Space in the Energy Sector

The objective of this paper is to elucidate an organizational process for the design of generic technologies (GTs). While recognizing the success of GTs, the literature on innovation management generally describes their design according to evolutionary strategies featuring multiple and uncertain trials, resulting in the discovery of common features among multiple applications. This random walk depends on multiple market and technological uncertainties that are considered exogenous: as smart as he can be, the ‘gambler’ must play in a given probability space. However, what happens when the innovator is not a gambler but a designer, i.e., when the actor is able to establish new links between previously independent emerging markets and technologies? Formally speaking, the actor designs a new probability space. Building on a case study of two technological development programmes at the French Center for Atomic Energy, we present cases of GTs that correspond to this logic of designing the probability space, i.e. the logic of intentionally designing common features that bridge the gap between a priori heterogeneous applications and technologies. This study provides another example showing that the usual trial-and-learning strategy is not the only strategy to design GTs and that these technologies can be designed by intentionally building new interdependences between markets and technologies. Our main result is that building these interdependences requires organizational patterns that correspond to a ‘design of exploration’ phase in which multiple technology suppliers and application providers are involved in designing both the probability space itself and the instruments to explore and benefit from this new space.

Absorptive capacity for radical innovation: A case study in the semiconductor industry

Absorptive capacity is one of the most important constructs to emerge in organizational research in recent decades for gaining insight into the link between knowledge and innovation. In 1989, Cohen and Levinthal analyzed the role of R&D in this context and distinguished “information generation” and the “ability to assimilate and exploit existing information” for innovation purposes [5]. They proposed a model of this second, less recognized capacity. They define Absorptive Capacity (AC) as the organizational capability to organize value and assimilate external knowledge in order to increase firm innovativeness. They assume that AC is a dynamic capability that depends on prior related knowledge in the form and combines value recognition of the missing knowledge, its assimilation and application.

Designing in an Innovative Design Regime—Introduction to C-K Design Theory

Innovation in the 20th century was not just a singular event, but was continuous, incremental, robust—powerful. It was intentional, organized, manageable and controllable. The aim of innovation in the 21st century is to maintain the same constancy and the same power, while at the same time being radical, disruptive and creative. Stable dominant designs built the generative bureaucracies of the 20th century; in the 21st century, new design organizations are aiming to sweep aside, break and continuously regenerate the rules.