Wie schon im vergangenen Jahr wird es auch 2014 wieder die komplette Vorlesung „Einführung in die BWL“ (Prof. Piller, RWTH) als komplett kostenlosen MOOC auf iversity.org geben. In diesem Wintersemester wird ebenfalls der Kurs „Internes Rechnungswesen und Buchführung“ (Prof. Letmathe, RWTH) angeboten. Somit können zwei der wichtigsten Grundlagenfächer im vollen Umfang per Video angesehen und gelernt werden.

Ebenfalls gibt es wieder das Angebot, auch als nicht-Student eine Klausur in Aachen zu schreiben und eine entsprechende Bescheinigung inklusive Ausweis der ECTS-Credits zu erhalten, die dem Workload der jweiligen Vorlesung entsprechen. Diese können an vielen Hochschulen für ein Studium angerechnet werden*. Um möglichst vielen Teilnehmern Zugang zu dieser Option zu ermöglichen, gibt es in diesem Jahr spezielle Angebote für Schüler und Auszubildende.

Viele weitere Informationen sowie Video-Einblicke in die Kurse gibt es ab sofort unter mooc.rwth-aachen.de

Wir freuen uns auf viele Teilnehmer und interessanten Austausch auf der Plattform!

*Ob eine ECTS-Bescheinigung akzeptiert und angerechnet wird liegt allein im Ermessen der jeweiligen Hochschule.

Original image from ghostgunner.net

3D-Printing (Additive Manufacturing) is a really trending technology that can and likely will have a major influence on the future of industrial production (and business models) as well as chances to DIY produce goods that previously had to be ordered at a high price from local crafters (like your favorite italian restaurant).

However, with that really bright future and the perspective to make another Star Trek dream a reality (the replicator), there comes a downside: You can not only print spare parts to repair your broken laundry machine but also such objects that should probably be more regulated.

Amongst them are firearms of all kinds. To those that monitor the 3D-Printing scene Cody Wilson’s 3D printed guns are old – although still worrying – news. However, now the man has gone one step further, offering a specially designed CNC mill that can produce the most critical part of a modern assault rifle, called the lower reciver. It is also the most regulated part, for a good reason. The Verge has the full story but from that alone it becomes aparent that with the new technologies that are becoming available for private households, new problems will arise alongside the many new chances.

Summertime in Aachen, Germany. That means fairly volatile weather to say the least, fast switching between blistering hot days and horrific thunderstorms. Blessings of global warming.

Fortunately, there are other, less chameleonic places in the world. One of them, Boston, MA, was the place to be for open and user innovation researchers over the past days, anyways. Here, the leading conference about all aspects of innovating with externals in general and users in particular took place once again: The 12^th Open and User Innovation Workshop (OUI) at Harvard Business School.

Ranging from Open Innovation, Open Source and Lead Users to Diffusion, User Innovation in Healthcare and the hot topic of Additive Manufacturing, tracks covered the entire range of modern open / user innovation research. And, as always and just like a big family reunion, the OUI brought together all those brilliant colleagues from universities around the world that one would love to discuss with on a more regular basis. A full list of tracks, topics and presenters can be found here (LINK).

Our group was also honored to contribute and present some of our latest research, including:

Beyond Pricing Decisions: Business Model Innovation in the Two Sided Market of an Open Innovation Intermediary (Andy Zynga, Dirk Lüttgens, Frank T. Piller)

Solve, Buy or Broadcast Search? An Empirical Investigation of R&D Managers‘ Governance Choices for Problem Solving (Christoph Ihl, Dirk Lüttgens)

Opening the Black Box of „Not-Invented-Here“: Attitudes, Decision Biases, and Behavioral Consequences (David Antons, Frank T. Piller)

User driven innovation in electromobility: Applying netnography to identify leading edge users in a high-tech environment (Patrick Pollok, Dirk Lüttgens, Frank T. Piller)

Organizing collaboration: The costs of innovative search (Kathleen Diener, Dirk Lüttgens, Frank T. Piller)

A full list of all presentations and their abstracts can be found here (LINK)

A tweet says more than thousand words. In this sentiment here is a collection of what has been tweeted by various attendants during these three days in Boston, including a lot of pictures that really transport the great atmosphere of this excellent event.

#oui2014 Tweets

And, last but most certainly not least, we want to say a heartfelt “thank you!” to those who excelled in organizing and hosting the OUI, once more: Carliss Baldwin (HBS), Karim Lakhani (HBS), Stefan Thomke (HBS), Eric von Hippel (MIT), Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington) and their entire team. It has been a great time!

More information about the Open User Innovation Workshop 2014 can be obtained from the official website at http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2014-oui/Pages/default.aspx

Also see this great blogpost by colleague Joel West for another view on the OUI2014!

The following is a repost of an excellent summary of our recent academic workshop on 3D printing, written by Prof. Joel West (KGI) and originally published on the Open Innovation Blog.

On Tuesday, Frank Piller and I hosted a successful workshop on 3D printing at RWTH Aachen. About 30 people attended the workshop: half from RWTH Aachen, the rest from other academic venues and a few from industry.

In many ways, 3D printing research reminds me of open source software research in 2001 or 2002. Frank says there is an explosion of research on 3D printing (i.e. more like OSS in 2005): I’m guessing this is concentrated in Europe because I’m not seeing it in the US. (But then, some of the early OSS research was phenomenon-based, which tends not to count much in U.S. business schools).

We had a deep dive into the science with Reinhart Poprawe, who’s both managing director of the Fraunhofer-Institut für Lasertechnik ILT and a professor at RWTH Aachen. With the rise of RepRap, MakerBot and other consumer technologies, most of us are familiar with the plastic (mostly FDM) 3D printing, but his focus is the high-quality, high-speed production of metal parts for industrial uses — which are the future of 3D printing as a manufacturing technique.

As an economic historian, I gave an overview of the first 30 years of 3D printing, outlining the path from the industrial prototyping companies of the 1980s (notably 3D Systems and Stratasys) through to the dozens of consumer-focused startups of this century. I noted three trends fueling the latter movement: the “maker” movement, open design communities and the expiration of a key patent. (Alas, I gave the talk in casual clothes, without benefit of the suitcase that AirBerlin delivered 24 hours after I arrived in Aachen.)

The RWTH Aachen business school (Frank) and the Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing (Simon Ford) summarized their respective research agendas. Not surprisingly, Frank’s group is interested in mass customization while Cambridge is using UK money “to examine the reality and the potential of digital fabrication for the UK economy.”

Thierry Rayna described how 3D printing is changing business model innovation, while Letizia Mortara talked about classifying 73 different maker spaces into 13 categories. Christian Weller of RWTH described experiments of allowing consumers to customize products and how they felt about their willingness to pay.

In our debrief, I noted the need to build a community of researchers that (as with the early days of OSS) read and build upon each other’s work. We don’t (or won’t) have a management journal, but there are several conferences. The best is Frank’s track on “Open Innovation and Additive Manufacturing” at the annual (von Hippel) Open and User Innovation Conference (where I hope to present). In June 2016, the Cambridge IfM group will be hosting the R&D Management Conference, so that’s another natural fit.

European OI researchers have also been fond of the annual ISPIM conference: the program for next week’s conference in Dublin mentions “open innovation,” including a plenary session on OI led by Wim Vanhaverbeke and a talk by Wim on the forthcoming New Frontiers in Open Innovation (Oxford, 2014). While 3D printing and additive manufacturing are nowhere mentioned at this year’s conference, there’s always next year.

Originally posted by Joel West on the Open Innovation Blog

Not too much new, but a nice summary of the field:

Source: ComputerScienceHub.orga>