Understanding collaborative design

Fast product follow-ups and increasing customer demands have changed product design from a rather unstructured process, into a systematic activity. Nowadays, both companies and researchers have developed the organizational aspects of integrated product design. However, attention to the collaborative aspects lags behind the structural and...

How to achieve aircraft availability in the MRO&U triad

The financial crisis and the introduction of low-budget companies have brought major changes to the air freight community. Competition became stronger and cost control became more important. This led to new ways of organizing aircraft Maintenance, Repair, Overhauls and Upgrades (MRO&U), which became performance oriented. For the triad of...

Improving industrial maintenance contract relationships

Unavailability of technical systems, such as aircraft, is expensive. Technical systems require maintenance to prevent and to remedy defects that cause unavailability. Users of technical systems usually bear the consequences of the risk of unavailability, in particular the loss of productivity. This is based on the presumption that users are best...

Get synchronized: Bridging the gap between design and volume production

The interface between Design and Manufacturing forms a locus of frequent interpersonal conflict. Misunderstandings, unwelcome surprises and planning problems are the rule rather than the exception. Within companies that deliver consumer goods in large quantities to the market this interface is also the transition from exploration (seeking new...

Theoretical foundations for collaboration engineering

Collaboration is often presented as the solution to numerous problems in business and society. However, collaboration is challenging, and collaboration support is not an off-the-shelf-product. This research offers theoretical foundations for Collaboration Engineering. Collaboration Engineering is an approach to design and deploy high value...

Help Me Help You. Designing Support for Person-Product Collaboration

This thesis explores how to make appliances, such as thermostats, televisions and microwave ovens, easier to program. It does so by looking at person-product interaction as a type of collaborative planning dialogues. The user and product must âtalkâ to each other, engaging in a collaborative dialogue that can lead to a shared plan concerning...

Decision Support for Collaborative Airport Strategic Planning

An airport’s operation and development impacts many stakeholders. Therefore, an airport should be treated as a socio-technical system. An airport operator and its stakeholders should strategically plan and develop the airport together. This dissertation describes the development of the HARMOS Decision Support System that can facilitate such...

Delivering Integrated Flood Risk Management: Governance for collaboration, learning and adaptation

The frequency and consequences of extreme flood events have increased rapidly worldwide in recent decades and climate change and economic growth are likely to exacerbate this trend. Flood protection measures alone cannot accommodate the future frequencies and impacts of flooding. Integrated flood risk management (IFRM) considers a portfolio of...

An Action Repertoire for the Collaboration in Innovation Networks

To develop today’s complex products, people from different organisations collaborate in innovation projects. The collaboration, though, is challenged by their different professional and organisational backgrounds, which determine their goals, their roles and responsibilities, and their expectations. People often struggle to deal with the...

Proximity and collaborative knowledge production in the water sector

Does distance matter for collaborative knowledge production? This question has intrigued scholars and policy makers for a long time. Distance does not only have a geographical dimension, but also an organisational, cognitive and social dimension. These dimensions feature prominently in the national and transnational research policies of the past...

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...

On decision-making for sewer replacement

Analysis of how decisions for sewer replacement are made in practice. Extra attention goes to the role of information quality and collaboration between stakeholders. The applied research methods are interviews, surveys and a serious game.

Empirical Modelling of Inter-organizational Knowledge Collaboration

Open innovation, knowledge co-creation, and research joint ven-tures, unified under the term 'inter-organizational knowledge collaboration', are discussed in various fields of innovation man-agement to ultimately shape inno-vation strategy of the organiza-tions and the innovation policy. <br/>Several ongoing debates are crucial in the allocation...

From Best Practices to Next Practices: Project-based learning in the development of large infrastructure

Over the last decades of development of knowledge management and organizational learning, there has been an increase in learning research within and across projects. Learning from past lessons in projects and preparing for the next project management practices is very important in large infrastructure projects. The autonomy of projects brings...