Johan Wenngren

Sharing Expertise: Easier Said Than Done

An extension towards service provision takes place in manufacturing industry. Inclusion of softer service aspects indicates that the common view on knowledge management to control and monitor a technical process have limitations. Sharing expertise is an additional way of managing knowledge particularly with the intentions to make experience based knowledge organizational available. By studying product developers’ daily work, especially how they perceive that they apply and share knowledge, we problematize knowledge activities in product-service development to discuss the established knowledge management activities. The paper suggests some considerations to support the development of a knowledge base for product-service design.

ADDRESSING TEAM BASED INNOVATION FOR SMALL FIRMS - CREATE, BUILD, TEST & LEARN

The Create-Build-Test-Learn supports toolbox for engineering concept development motivates not only experimentation, but also instils design thinking in teams. By offering tools and methods for rec ...

Improving Team Activities in the Concept Development Stages: Addressing Radical Development and Open-Ended Problems

ABSTRACT Firms seeking radical innovation require development teams to articulate design solutions based on open-ended problems. Such problems have no single answer to the problematical situation, but have several plausible solutions. Although prior studies have highlighted the importance of prototyping or other methodologies, they provide limited guidance toward addressing open-ended problems. We investigate how teams make sense of complex design and development problems in order to benefit innovative endeavors. The results illustrate a team-level concept development model that identifies critical stages, associated activities, and influencing mind-set to explain how engineering teams overcome challenges associated with open-ended problems.

Commercial Space Tourism – A Case of Applied Product-Service Systems Networks

In the vision of Product-Service Systems (PSS) there is anticipation on stakeholders to develop sound networks to enable and support innovative product and service solutions. As such PSS business relationships could be viewed as innovation systems. The challenge to find appropriate and relevant stakeholders is commonly mentioned in manufacturing industry as a difficult task. This paper elaborates on such a challenge, but has put an emerging industry as a frame of interest in order to discuss the progress of a innovation system which has the purpose to inspire product and service development based on commercial human space flights. Some managerial implications for PSS innovation system development are made, for example it is suggested to implement a learning environment as a “demonstrator” from which an innovation system can evolve.

A Change in Design Knowledge

In the manufacturing industry, offering services as the value carrier of the product is becoming a key interest. In short, the product concept changes from something engineered to providing “perfor ...