Kjetil Kristensen

Enhancing collaboration in communities of professionals using a Living Lab approach

The Living Lab approach within the multi-year integrated project ECOSPACE focused on community building and active user involvement in the process of developing, introducing and evaluating new collaboration concepts and tools. This article reports about implementing and evaluating our adapted Living Labs framework to facilitate innovation in collaborative work environments to enhance professional communities. The pursued implementation approach is considered as a strategy for innovation, change and adoption. We use a perspective of socio-technical systems to explain the change-catalysing role of our framework and findings.

A Living Lab approach for enhancing collaboration in Professional Communities

The ECOSPACE Integrated Project has developed an advanced collaborative workspace platform for eProfessionals. The technologies, services and collaboration tools have been developed, integrated and validated in various living labs addressing different contexts of eProfessional working. This paper reports about the Living Lab for Professional Communities of Innovation and covers three different user environments where innovative tools, services and practices have been experimented in different experimental settings. The first setting addresses the support of new work and collaboration practices in professional education. The second setting focuses on collaboration among business and research partners in promoting regional innovation. The third setting is about collaborative innovation in virtual communities. In the three settings, different user communities have adopted and experimented different sets of collaboration services. The paper presents the living lab methodology designed to launch, operate and monitor the different innovation and validation settings. Based on a cross-comparison of results and a longitudinal analysis, conclusions are drawn regarding the effectiveness of innovation services and collaborative platform, strategies to involve users and building user communities, and the effectiveness of the living labs methodology.

Collaborative Environments to Support Professional Communities: A Living Lab Approach

The living labs approach within ECOSPACE focuses on early user community building and active user involvement in the process of developing, testing and evaluating new collaboration concepts and tools. This paper reports about implementing and evaluating the living labs approach to facilitate innovation in collaborative work environments to enhance professional communities. The living lab approach is considered as a strategy for innovation, change and adoption. The perspective of socio-technical systems is used to understand and explain the change-catalyzing role of the living lab approach.

Virtual obeya: A new collaborative web application for running lean management workshops

Obeya rooms were introduced during the early Nineties by Toyota executives, as a visual approach to break down organizational barriers that prevented effective collaboration in Lean Management meetings. While indisputably effective in achieving their aim, they lacked the option to directly interact with the underlying (electronic) sources of information, because operations were mainly to be carried out manually, i.e. making use of A3 sheets. Moreover, communication was limited in time and space, being confined to what happened in a single project room. In this paper, we propose a mash-up web application, which we have called the Virtual Obeya, whose purpose is to overcome the aforementioned limits. The application, when used in proper context, enables asynchronous sharing of information in distributed teams; being seamlessly connected with cloud and local repositories, it also allows collaboration in real time through data and document manipulation. A subset of smaller, integrated apps has been identified and developed to replace former A3 sheets and to provide, among other examples, semantic search and operations monitoring capabilities. The tool is now in an early prototype development stage and it will soon be tested in pilot environments.

Applications of the Physual Designing Network in extended teams

This paper presents the Physual Designing Network (Physual.net), and addresses common connectivity problem in heterogeneous, asymmetrical teams, where the different contributors have differentiated access to collaborative resources. This has been accomplished through the development of flexible collaborative systems that support asymmetrical collaborative situations as well as symmetrical ones, for instance interaction between teams operating in a collaborative arena and one or more individuals using desktop-based systems. The Physual Designing Network provides a set of tools that increase the flexibility and level of interactivity, as well as increasing the feeling of presence, trust and control in complex, dispersed teams. The Physual Designing Network has been tested extensively with up to four locations engaged simultaneously, and a variety of symmetrical and asymmetrical collaborative situations are supported.

LEAP Collaboration System

Abstract The LEAP collaboration system is a compilation of models, concepts, elements, and technology components that—when combined and structured in a meaningful way to teams of end users—enable companies to execute split-location engineering projects in a way that represents a competitive advantage. Written specifically for split-location and multidisciplinary teams, this chapter contains a description of these elements in the context of split-location engineering. Furthermore, this chapter describes how to develop and operationalize such a system in a way that represents a holistic, meaningful, and value-adding collaborative working environment that enables engineers and other knowledge workers to make decisions, solve problems, and address multidisciplinary issues effectively and efficiently. Based on lean thinking, the LEAP collaboration system approach identifies ways of reducing waste in collaboration processes. An evaluation of knowledge sources is described, together with approaches supporting knowledge creation in lean engineering environments. This chapter concludes with a toolbox that companies can use to diagnose collaboration problems and challenges, and systematically improve collaboration in their teams.

Challenges for information access in multi-disciplinary product design and engineering settings

In any larger engineering setting, there is a huge number of documents that engineers and others need to use and be aware of in their daily work. To improve the handling of this amount of documents, we propose to view it under the angle of a new domain for professional search, thus incorporating search engine knowledge into the process. We examine the use of Information Retrieval (IR), Recommender Systems (RecSys), and Knowledge Management (KM) methods in the engineering domain of Knowledge-based Engineering (KBE). The KBE goal is to capture and reuse knowledge in product and process engineering with a systematic method. Based on previous work in professional search and enterprise search, we explore a combination of methods and aim to identify key issues in their application to KBE. We list detected challenges, discuss information needs and search tasks, then focus on issues to solve for a successful integration of the IR and KBE domain and give a system overview of our approach to build a search and recommendation tool to improve the daily information-seeking workflow of engineers in knowledge-intense disciplines. Our work contributes to bridging the gap between Information Retrieval and engineering support systems.

Idea management: A life-cycle perspective on innovation

Innovation is rapidly becoming a strategic priority, but there is a large gap between the perceived importance of innovation and the effectiveness and appropriateness of approaches and methods used to systematically support and accelerate innovation. This paper presents results and conclusions from a new Idea Management concept that has been developed, introduced and tested in two company-wide idea campaigns in a Norwegian consulting company. This Idea Management concept is based on a life-cycle perspective on innovation, where the aim is to support all phases from insight to post-implementation learning and feedback. The overall concept is described, and comparative analyses of the two idea campaigns and three different Idea Management categories are provided together with conclusions and recommendations for companies interested in improving their Idea Management practices.

Investigating contextual ontologies and document corpus characteristics for information access in engineering settings

ABSTRACT Knowledge and information are valuable resources in enterprises for solution reuse. However, identifying relevant information from a rapidly growing number of unstructured resources is challenging for users. We discuss a personalized information access tool for professional workplaces based on recommender systems to provide relevant documents for users in specific work contexts based on domain-specific ontologies. Our use case is a multidisciplinary engineering project. We provide an in-depth analysis on the content and context of documents using information retrieval methods and semantic annotations. Upon this, we build a contextual ontology as our knowledge domain for the recommender system and evaluate the level of retrievability and coverage of it against the documents. Our results provide insight into engineers’ document workspaces and show that even a simple domain ontology is able to match a majority of documents from a domain-oriented corpus. The findings support our approach of using ontology-based recommendation for domain-specific workspaces.

LEAP Virtual Obeya

Engineering is becoming more collaborative and increasingly global. However, inefficiencies in the communication and collaboration between engineers and engineering teams that are geographically distributed routinely cause competiveness and quality problems, as well as slowing the time to market for new innovations. Hence, networked knowledge exchange between engineers, both inside and outside the boundaries of a company site, is becoming increasingly important. In this chapter we will present a new IT-based tool called LEAP Virtual Obeya that is able to overcome some of the limitations of existing tools and traditional approaches. The LEAP Virtual Obeya is a flexible concept that incorporates lean thinking and enables new visual project management approaches in teams engaged in specific processes, such as innovation and engineering design, offering enhanced support for specific tasks such as problem solving, decision making, coediting, and issue/task management. The LEAP Virtual Obeya has been evaluated based on actual use in industrial cases. Although the current implementation appears to be best for simple collaborations, the results are also promising to support more complex collaborative cases in a networked enterprise setting.