Practical Product Development Challenges

Despite the many product development techniques available today, manufacturers under pressure to reduce time to market while keeping up with stricter regulatory demands are struggling more than ever with their product development processes. Here, I list a selection of problems and challenges frequently encountered in my consulting practice...

Recent Advances and Design Strategies Towards Wearable Near-infrared Spectroscopy

With a growing focus on properties of softness, miniaturization, and intelligence, extensive research has been focusing on constructing wearable electronic devices facilitating comfort, wearable health monitoring and diagnosis. Among recent progress in the development of wearable bioelectronics, wearable near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS)...

On the drivers of demand for innovative freight transportation services

Contemporary innovations in freight transportation and logistics are instrumental in achieving more integrated, efficient, and sustainable services in the global market. While much attention is going to how contemporary innovations, including technology-enabled and management innovations, change the supply of services, little work is done on...

Technological Uncertainty and Standardization Strategies: A Coopetition Framework

Standards may be arrived at through various coordination mechanisms, including cooperation, coopetition, or competition. This article explores how technological uncertainty affects the coordination mechanism for standardization. The article is based on the Community Innovation Survey, a sizeable firm-level survey representative of the...

Twisted thinking: Technology, values and critical thinking

Technology should be aligned with our values. We make the case that attempts to align emerging technologies with our values should reflect critically on these values. Critical thinking seems like a natural starting point for the critical assessment of our values. However, extant conceptualizations of critical thinking carve out no space for the...

Fostering Ambidextrous Innovation Strategies in Large Infrastructure Projects: A Team Heterogeneity Perspective

In emerging economies, infrastructure projects are in full swing. There is a wealth of replicable experience for exploitation. Simultaneously, more technologies and methodologies require further exploration. This makes fostering ambidextrous innovation strategies (i.e., the tradeoff between exploitative and exploratory innovation strategies) a...

Increasing market opportunities for renewable energy technologies with innovations in aquifer thermal energy storage

Heating and cooling using aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) has hardly been applied outside the Netherlands, even though it could make a valuable contribution to the energy transition. The Climate-KIC project “Europe-wide Use of Energy from aquifers” – E-USE(aq) – aimed to pave the way for Europe-wide application of ATES, through the...

Low carbon heating and cooling by combining various technologies with Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage

A transition to a low carbon energy system is needed to respond to global challenge of climate change mitigation. Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) is a technology with worldwide potential to provide sustainable space heating and cooling by (seasonal) storage and recovery of heat in the subsurface. However, adoption of ATES varies strongly...

Eco-efficiency assessment of technological innovations in high-grade concrete recycling

The increasing volume of Construction and demolition waste (CDW) associated with economic growth is posing challenges to the sustainable management of the built environment. The largest fraction of all the CDW generated in the member states of the European Union (EU) is End-of-life (EOL) concrete. The most widely applied method for EOL concrete...

The Invisible Hand of Innovation showing in the General Purpose Technology of Electricity

The unintended economic effect on society as result of individual behaviour —Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ of economic progress in the eighteenth century — had its equivalent in technological progress. In the nineteenth century, again individual behaviour with its Acts of Innovation and Acts of Business had an unintended effect. It changed not...

Search for a Common Ground in the Fogs of Innovation Definitions

Defining Innovation is essential for Innovation Research. However, the available definitions of the notion of innovation found in the increasing scholarly publications, show a large heterogeneity creating confusion and incompatibility. In this paper we analyze the innovation-definitions that emerged after WW-II according their different thinking...