Irrigation technology at the service of smallholder farmers: A sociotechnical approach to exploring sustainable business strategies

Recently, there has been a growing need for sustainable agriculture to increase food security, alleviate poverty, and contribute to climate change mitigation. Smallholder farmers (SFs) play a key role in this endeavor as they are a considerable segment of the global farming population. Despite their relevance, SFs face several challenges that...

Simulating industrial symbiosis: Understanding and shaping circular business models for viable and robust industrial symbiosis networks through collaborative modelling and simulation

The European Commission aims for a full circular economy (CE), an economy that aims to reuse all resources in 2050. CE is a promising way to increase welfare and wellbeing while decreasing environmental footprints. Industrial symbiosis, in which companies exchange residuals for resource efficiency, is essential to the circular transition....

Implementing Business Model Innovation: Human and organisational perspectives

Although business model innovation (BMI) can create a firm's competitive advantage and enhance its performance, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) fail to obtain the expected outcomes when innovating their business model. BMI leads to irreversible fundamental changes in key components of a company's business model, which means it...

Aggregators’ business models for flexibility from electricity consumers

In order to limit the amount of greenhouse gas emission, transitioning to renewable energy sources (RES) is critical. However, integrating RES in the existing power system is not straightforward since RES possess variable and uncertain characteristics. Due to these characteristics, as the penetration of RES increases, maintaining the balance...

Circular Strategies Enabled by the Internet of Things: Opportunities, Implementation Challenges, and Environmental Impact

The concept of a ‘Circular Economy’ (CE) has been gaining traction in business, policy, and academia. It envisions an economy powered by renewable energy in which the value of products and materials are preserved for as long as possible. ‘Design for Circular Economy’ is emerging as a research field as well as a branch of sustainable design...

Exploring business change: The design of a digital tooling for business model exploration for the automotive ecosystem

Opportunities such as digital technologies are fundamentally reshaping businesses. Enterprises are moving from selling physical products and services, to providing digitally enabled services. Enterprises need to rethink their business models and how to adapt them to take advantage of these opportunities. How to adapt the existing business model...

Open for business: Project-specific value capture strategies of architectural firms

Architectural firms can be regarded as creative professional service firms. As such, architects need to navigate creative, professional and commercial goals, while simultaneously attempting to fulfil client, user and societal needs. This complex process is becoming increasingly difficult, as the historically established role of architects has...

Design for Managing Obsolescence: A Design Methodology for Preserving Product Integrity in a Circular Economy

This thesis argues that in order to increase the likelihood that product lifetime extension in a circular economy will be successful from both an environmental and an economic perspective, industrial designers need to be able to control not only the spatial dimension (materialization and geometry) of products, but also their temporal dimension....

From Access to Re-use: A user's perspective on public sector availability

Availability of public sector (geo-)information is essential for effective and efficient government policy-making. In addition, it is also associated with realising other ambitions, such as a more transparent and accountable government, more citizens’ participation in democratic processes, (co-)generation of solutions to societal problems, and...

Serving the Poor: Designing a Mobile Service Platform for Smallholder Farmer Inclusion in Global Value Chains

The starting point for this research was the rapid proliferation of mobile devices, which had covered 95% of the world’s population by 2014. This research addresses the role of multi-sided mobile service platforms in improving the lives of smallholder farmers, who make up a large proportion of the world’s poor. The mobile phone has the potential...

The Alignment of Business Model and Business Operations within Networked-­Enterprise Environments

For a long time, technology has served as a silver bullet to gain a sustainable competitive advantage and to outperform the competitors. However, access to and exploitation of technologies gradually becomes a commodity, hence a less powerful resource to be leveraged to a competitive edge. Instead, companies increasingly are captivated by the...

The Design of a Large Scale Airline Network

Airlines invest a lot of money before opening new pax transportation services, for this reason, airlines have to analyze if their profits will overcome the amount of money they have to invest to open new services. The design and analysis of the feasibility of airlines networks can be done by using the models developed in this thesis. It is...

Governing mobile service innovation in co-evolving value networks

Mobile service innovation requires a broad set of resources and capabilities that are not controlled by one single actor. Equipment manufacturers, operators, content providers and application developers have to work together in so-called value networks in order to develop and offer services to end-users. There is serious debate as to how the...