This graduation thesis for the master Strategic Product Design at the Delft University of Technology is written as a research and advice report for the civil engineering and advice agency Witteveen+Bos. More specifically for the Digital Acceleration product-market combination (PMC). The report answers the following question: “Is Witteveen+Bos as an organization structurally fit for developing, maintaining and marketing digital products?”...

This report describes a graduation project for the MSc Program Strategic Product Design. The client of this project is a University Medical Centre in the Netherlands. Due to privacy, the client is referred to as: “the Dutch UMC.” The Dutch UMC wants to become an innovating leader in health care but faces many problems during the act of innovation. Because the organization is struggling to locate, describe and tackle the encountered problems, a research project was set up to provide the organization with new tools to properly organize innovation. Therefore, the research question of this project is defined as: “how can the Dutch UMC realize innovation?”. This research resulted in defining seven problem areas which, each in their own way, have a negative impact on the innovation process. The shared cause for the defined problems is a defect in the current innovation process. Cooper (1993) divides the innovation process into six stages. When comparing these stages to the current process within the Dutch UMC, it becomes visible how the first three stages are neglected or skipped. These early stages of the innovation process are also referred to as the pre-development stages or the fuzzy front end (Hestatt and Verworn, 2004). Apart from sharing this insight with the organization, an innovation framework was created to organize the front end of the innovation process. This framework is based on design thinking, which is proposed as the most suitable method for non-design organizations to structure the front end of innovation. The framework delivers the required input to start the conversation on re-organizing innovation and start a transformation towards fast and engaging health care innovation by design.

Accenture Interactive, the marketing arm of international consultancy Accenture, has been created to address the evolving needs of their clients in the field of design and technology. As a result, Accenture Interactive now consists of several pillars that together can deliver a meaningful end-to-end experience. Delivering value to the client and the organization in projects by collaborating across pillars are called cross-pillar projects.

However, Accenture Interactive encounters that the current collaboration between the different pillars in client projects is not at the level they would like it to be. In line with this observation, the purpose of this thesis was to explore what goes wrong in the current cross-pillar projects, with the aim to reveal the influencing factors of these projects.

Therefore, this thesis aimed to improve the cross- pillar performance by defining the definition of cross- pillar working in the context of Accenture Interactive, and resolving the barriers towards the envisioned level of cross-pillar working. As a result, an integrated solution was created, consisting of improvements in existing communication channels and adding a proposition development approach to the existing initiation process.

This was examined by conducting twelve in-depth interviews with different pillars, from six completed cross-pillar projects. The interviews defined the context of cross-pillar work in Accenture Interactive and the elements that make up all the studied cross-pillar projects. Then, a deeper look was taken at differences emerged between the performance of the studied projects. This led to the problem statement that the performance of a cross-pillar project is influenced by the presence of awareness and willingness in the initiation of the projects.

A deeper study was conducted to determine which barriers are present during initiation preventing awareness and willingness. The design goal, was to develop means and approaches that could help employees to facilitate cross-pillar collaboration during the initiation of new projects. To facilitate implementation, it is proposed that existing activities, like Chapter Zero and Friday morning meetings, could help serve that purpose. The end goal of this approach is to learn to initiate cross-pillar projects by experiencing how to bring value to clients by collaborating between pillars.

Furthermore, a roadmap is created to guide Accenture Interactive in bridging the gap between the results of this project and the new practice of cross-pillar working. This roadmap aligns the different development processes within Accenture Interactive, reflects how this thesis’s outcomes fit within the intended timeline, and provides direction to Accenture Interactive’s vision.

With the rising renewable energy demand, sustainable energy storage systems become more important. Zero Emission Fuels (ZEF) is developing a solar powered methanol micro-plant that produces methanol, using water and carbon dioxide, out of the air. ZEF’s focus this far was on developing the subsystems for the micro-plant. This report is about the integration design of the different subsystems. The main integration challenge was to design a functional micro-plant concept that produces methanol at a low cost. The state-of-the-art subsystem designs were researched, and a base-case cost estimation was conducted. Next, in a scaling research it appeared optimal to implement one micro-plant per three solar panels, instead of one plant per panel. A functional configuration architecture was designed and conceptual mass producible subsystem designs were developed. These designs were used for building a scale 1:1 integration prototype and for conducting a cost analysis of the concept. The microplant concept would produce methanol at a significantly lower cost compared to the base-case. Consequently, the micro-plant reached the target cost. Design guidelines and recommendations are given for further optimising the micro-plant's integration design and costs.