Exploring business model innovation in professional service firms: Insights from architecture

Business model innovation may be a significant source of competitive advantage and firm performance. New ways of doing business have become increasingly important in the professional service sector. This research specifically focuses on business model innovation by architecture firms, which are suffering from the current financial crisis and...

Innovation process and needs of sustainability driven small firms

Traditional approaches to sustainable consumption and production emphasized addressing issues related to the natural environment and sustainability through optimizing existing products, processes and businesses. Even though the conventional wisdom suggests that young and new firms have greater advantages in innovation, there are few studies that...

Innovation process and needs of sustainability driven small firms

Traditional approaches to sustainable consumption and production emphasized addressing issues related to the natural environment and sustainability through optimizing existing products, processes and businesses. Even though the conventional wisdom suggests that young and new firms have greater advantages in innovation, there are few studies that...

Trialogues: A framework for bridging the gap between people research and design

In design research literature, several tools and techniques have been developed that support design teams in establishing creative understandings of people and their contexts of product use, e.g. [1] [2] [3]. Many of these approaches suggest that designers simply adopt the role of people researcher. However, in industrial design practice, the...

Show me what you’ve got - the influence of combined sketching on idea generation in teams

The present study investigates the influence of common sketches on the idea generation process in early concept generation. Thirty-six teams of three design students were given a small task in which they were asked to come up with visualized ideas. In the control groups, team members sketched on an individual sheet of paper while working in a...

Toward a general model of portfolio decision making

We develop a general model of how new product development portfolio decisions are made based on four diverse case studies. Previous research has investigated portfolio decisions as individually discrete decisions. We find that portfolio decision-making has to be considered as an integrated system of domain-based processes that produce evidence-,...

Technology as enabler for empowerment in distributed teams - a field study on leadership attitudes.

In this field study on distributed teams we examined the impact of communication media on attitudes towards empowerment and integration of remote subgroups. Using Q-methodology, interviews and questionnaires we compared attitudes of team members and managers in low and high media-rich environments. Our results indicate that use of richer media...

Tactical decision games - developing scenario-based training for decision-making in distributed teams

Team training should reflect the increasing complexity of decision-making environments. Guidelines for scenario-based training were adopted for a distributed setting and tested in a pilot training session with a distributed team in the offshore oil industry. Participants valued the scenario as challenging and useful, but also highlighted...

Novice-Expert Design Consultations: Findings from a Field Study

This study aimed to investigate the process of novice-expert consultation meetings in an organizational context by identifying phases of the discourse and analysing the nature of these phases. An empirical study was performed at Rolls-Royce Aerospace Engineering by capturing 7 audio-records of meetings between trainees (novices) and expert...

Novice–expert consultations as a vehicle for organizational learning - a field study in engineering product development

Product development is a knowledge intensive activity and organizational learning across projects and functions is vital for its success. This paper explores novice–expert consultations as a vehicle of social learning through a detailed analysis of meetings during an engineering training programme. Although the meetings were initiated for the...

An integrated model of portfolio decision-making processes ; an extended abstract

Discussion paper: Issues related to conducting a global studio

The purpose of this paper is to initiate discussion and guide a proposed workshop on issues in cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary design studios, with a focus on assessment. This paper overviews issues associated with the implementation and coordination of the Global Studio, a recent cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional teaching...