The Experience Lab: Lifting Zodiac to new heights of innovation

Flying has always spoken to people’s imagination, though nothing fundamental has changed in the passenger experience on board of an airliner in the last decades. Flying has become a commodity but the same kind of base products is still used, and innovation mainly occurs in technical fields such as lightweight materials and cost-effective production methods. As this technical product-mindset still defines the world of aerospace engineering today, there are opportunities in a more user-centered approach left untapped. Till now, services and user experience have been left to the airlines to decide, but for truly innovative product-service system development, there is a need for a new way of stakeholder conversation. Zodiac Aerospace with its vast global network is in an ideal position to take the lead in such conversations, when an internal paradigm-shift can be achieved towards Product-Service System thinking. Assignment formulation by Driessen (Zodiac CE): "We meet the demands of our focal points within Airlines but in OEM program’s (Original Equipment Manufacturers like Airbus, Boeing,..) we cannot only rely on years of experience and must become pro-active otherwise we lose control over our own developments. It is the task of the Development Department to become pro-active to foresee and prepare ourselves towards these demands. Knowledge management, Lean developments, recruiting communicative developers and Open Innovation are ingredients to become more open and pro-active. Driessen is a product company with a long customer-centric development and manufacturing tradition, enabling airlines to service their passengers. Yet, the border towards developing product-service combinations has never really been crossed. As such, the main challenge is to shift the paradigm from developing products to enabling services. Therefore a Crew Experience Lab is needed where more can be learned about the enabled services, and to optimize user/product-interaction. In such a lab, the products become “objects of conversation”, which is a key learning tool for Research and Development. The scope of this graduation project is to design a Crew Experience Lab, and develop a stakeholder workshop methodology to be able to translate stakeholder sessions into insights for R&D."

Subject

aviation
knowledge management
product-service systems
user-centred design
context research

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Embargo date

2014-05-17

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Campus only

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Student theses

Document type

master thesis

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