Our Research Topics

Innovation Management is a diverse discipline. Due to it’s importance for different aspects of corporate future readiness, it concerns more than just one focus area. Here are the aspects we spend most of our research time on.

General Innovation Management

Creating and managing new technological knowledge is a critical key success factor of most firms. In our research we both reflect on innovation management from the theoretic perspectiv of academia but also work closely with companies of all sizes and from various branches to develop more practically valuable strategies and techniques of planning, structuring and executing innovation management in a corporate context.

Industrial Internet of Things / Industrie 4.0

The (industrial) Internet of Things is one of the major topics for industry and academia alike. Smart use of so-called Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has the potential to heavily impact industrial productivity, lower production cost, allow to bring back formerly outsourced production to high-wage countries and enable new forms of collaborative value-creation. In the consumer-goods sector, connected devices can change the way we live and interact.

ments of your institution.

Business Model Innovation

The core of any business is its business model. No matter what service of product a company offers, if it is not betting its existance on pure chance, a hypothesis should exist that outlines how to earn money from corporate activities. In the past, the invention or renewal of business models has often been left to either coincidence or the genius of a few (often just one) innovators within a company.

Open Innovation

n our understanding, open innovation is the formal discipline and practice of leveraging the discoveries of unobvious others as input for the innovation process through formal and informal relationships.

The objective is to access external information to reduce uncertainties in an innovation project with regard to need and solution information. Open innovation goes beyond conventional contractual arrangements of organizing collaborative value creation.

Mass Customization

Mass Customization means to offer products or services which meet the demands of each individual customer, but which still can be produced and delivered with mass production efficiency. Or, as B. Joseph Pine, who made mass customization popular with his 1993 book,: “Today I define Mass Customization as the low-cost, high-volume, efficient production of individually customized offerings”.

Additive Manufacturing

In our research, we strive to explore the field and to better understand the economic perspectives of additive manufacturing. In one stream of our research, for example, we are studying how AM enables a more local production by users, supplementing the recent development of an upcoming infrastructure for innovating users and “makers”.

Customer Co-Creation

Customer co-creation, in short, is open innovation with customers. It is a product (or service) development approach where users and customers are actively involved and take part in the design of a new offering. More specifically, we define customer co-creation as an active, creative, and social process, based on collaboration between producers (retailers) and customers (users). The idea of co-creation is to actively involve customers in the design or development of future offerings, often with the help of tools that are provided by the firm.

Efficient Technology Transfer

Approximately 70 billion Euro are being spent on research & development every year. However, transfering the knowledge gained and technology developed into (commercialized) innovation often proves to be a serious bottleneck.

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