Changes in the French Defence Innovation System: New roles and capabilities for the Government Agency for Defence.

Defence innovation systems are structured around two main groups of players that interact in the development of complex programmes: the state (the client and the government agency) and the systems integrators. Technological and institutional changes since the 1990s have affected the division of labour and knowledge in the industry. In this paper, we show the origins of these changes based on information derived from 45 qualitative interviews conducted between 2000 and 2008, which demonstrate the new capabilities that have been created within the national innovation system (NIS). We explain how the role and the capabilities of the French Government Agency for Defence (Direction Générale de l'Armement—DGA) have developed from “project architect” to “project manager”. These new capabilities create new interactions in the French defence innovation system and new roles for the DGA.Defence; Institutional change; National innovation system; co-evolution; Government agency; Knowledge; Capabilities; Technological systems;

Changes in the French defence innovation system: New roles and capabilities for the Government Agency for Defence

Defence innovation systems are structured around two main groups of players that interact in the development of complex programmes: the state (the client and the government agency) and the systems integrators. Technological and institutional changes since the 1990s have affected the division of labour and knowledge in the industry. In this paper we show the origins of these changes based on information derived from 45 qualitative interviews conducted between 2000 and 2008, which demonstrate the new capabilities that have been created within the national innovation system (NIS). We explain how the role and the capabilities of the French Government Agency for Defence (Direction Générale de l'Armement - DGA) have developed from " project architect " to " project manager ". These new capabilities create new interactions in the French Defence innovation system and new roles for the DGA.Technological systems, Capabilities, Knowledge, Government agency, Co-evolution, National Innovation System, Defence, Institutional Change.

Knowledge Transfer Needs and Methods

INE/AUTC 12.3

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

A methodology for the 'live' capture and reuse of project knowledge in construction

The importance of capturing and sharing useful knowledge from construction projects has been recognised by the construction industry. However, issues such as the loss of important insights due to the time lapse in capturing the knowledge, the need for sharing the knowledge captured as soon as possible in order to maximise the benefits brought about by reusing the knowledge, and the need to share the knowledge before the opportunities for reusing the knowledge diminish have not been adequately addressed. To address this, it is crucial for knowledge to be captured as soon as possible once it is created or identified (i.e. 'live') in a collaborative environment, and presented in a format that will facilitate its reuse during and after the project. This research was aimed at developing a methodology that facilitates the `live' capture and reuse of project knowledge in construction. An extensive literature review was first conducted on the concept of knowledge management and the current practices for managing project knowledge. Subsequently, case studies involving six companies were carried out to investigate the shortcomings of current practice and the end-user requirements for the capture and reuse of project knowledge. These requirements informed the development of the methodology for `live' capture and reuse of project knowledge. The Web IS Development Methodology (Avison and Fitzgerald, 2003) employing ASP. NET 2.0 was adopted to encapsulate the methodology into a Web-based prototype application. The evaluation of the prototype revealed that the methodology can enable project knowledge to be captured and shared `live' across different organisations without significant additional workload and costs. It is concluded that the `live' capture and reuse of project knowledge in construction is important in preventing knowledge loss and helping to harness the project knowledge captured. A combination of both KM technologies and techniques is essential for the effective management of tacit and explicit knowledge. The prototype application developed can facilitate the `live' capture and reuse of project knowledge as shown by the results of the evaluation. There is scope for enhancing this study by exploring the integration of the prototype application with other information systems, and the use of software agents to automatically locate useful knowledge from the Internet and project extranets. The methodology developed will help construction organisation to leverage their knowledge in a timely way to meet the challenge of today's fast evolving world

Fuzzy Front End of Innovation Process Management in High Technology Companies: Knowledge Sharing in Virtual Communities of Practice.

This thesis seeks to examine the challenges inherent in creating and managing knowledge at the front-end stages of innovation. Specifically, the work develops new knowledge to understand how the formation of Virtual Community of Practice (VCoP) informs the front end of New Product Design (NPD) and the use of uncodified knowledge to achieve Fuzzy Front End (FFE) innovation outcomes. The ‘fuzziness’ comes from the fact that this cannot be codified and therefore predicted. This is relevant because a lot of new product failures have been attributed to the lack of management at the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation (FFEI) and the technologies at play in this stage. It is for these reasons that the FFE is a very important aspect of potentially successful innovations (Coates, 2009). Studies have shown that ‘speed to market’ and ‘product quality’ play a role in the positive impact of investment at the FFE phase on subsequent profitability (McNally et al., 2011). This is particularly significant, as it has also been established that expenses incurred in the later stages of the innovation process do not have any significant effect on the profitability of new product innovations (McNally et al., 2011). The ‘fuzziness’ and intangible nature of the FFE phase of NPD creates and adds to the complexities and challenges experienced in the management of these activities. Scholars have therefore called for a richer understanding of this phase through more extensive research at the FFE to advance the innovation management discipline as a whole (Bertels et al., 2011). In order to identify the problem areas at the FFE, the researcher has uncovered recurring themes and concepts in the knowledge management field, observing a positive connection between tacit knowledge, knowledge transfer and Situated Learning Theory (SLT) of Community of Practice (CoP) at the FEI within high technology organisations. This is supported by empirical evidence, which states that individuals or groups with more social connections are more likely to be innovative, creative and share knowledge than isolated people or groups (Bjork & Magnusson, 2009). This in turn points to the knowledge transmission benefits of a CoP, particularly in relation to the transfer of tacit knowledge. However, understanding remains undeveloped theoretically, conceptually and empirically with regard to how a CoP in a physical environment, and in particular within a VCoP in a virtual environment, can operate effectively to resolve problems at the FFE of the innovation stage. Findings from the research suggest that the FEI should not be structured, and that businesses need to build an enabling environment to sustain the FFEI. Innovation on the front or back end should not be left to itself either, it has to be managed or governed in some way. In order to develop and manage VCoP at the FFI, this research recommends a sustainable, flexible and adaptable innovation process. This may be understood as creating a vehicle for the innovation process filtered through several gates where all experiences and the innovation journey itself is properly scrutinised. It is further proposed that this approach can also assist in the mitigation of risk. Finally, the use of virtual communication tools such as emails, online repository, virtual workspace and video conferencing for VCoP activities has become standard working practice for many businesses. Organisations who pay close attention to finding better ways to utilise, adapt and apply these tools to specific VCoP projects will be more likely achieve positive results

Improving reuse of in-service information capture and feedback

The adoption of the PSS business model means that the designing company has greater scope and motivation to learn from experience of its products in use to improve their core design and engineering capabilities. Continuous improvement, however, depends crucially upon the implementation of effective Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) systems within a dynamic learning environment that impinge on diverse communities throughout the product lifecycle. This paper consolidates literature reviews and presents our empirical observations relating to the current KIM systems and practices within large aerospace and manufacturing companies. In particular, we discuss issues and experiences from a case study to enhance reuse of in-service feedback conducted with an aerospace company. The case study involves the organisation of inservice records to expedite retrieval and knowledge discovery

Why organizations fail to share knowledge: an empirical investigation and opportunities for improvement

Purpose: This paper explores critical failure factors (CFFs) in the context of knowledge sharing. It provides further insights into what can cause knowledge sharing failures, inflexible knowledge sharing strategies and ineffective knowledge sharing mechanisms. It also examines how practitioners can reduce or even mitigate such dysfunctions. Design/methodology/approach: A case-based inductive approach was conducted. Data was collected from two studies applying mixed methods. The first data set included nine in-depth, semi-structured interviews with highly skilled personnel from an Aerospace and Defense organization. The second data source included 375 successfully completed questionnaires from participants employed at the same organization. Findings: The paper identifies six CFFs with an impact on knowledge sharing. It also reveals that managing organizational ignorance can play a key role in generating new knowledge and averting failure. Study findings provide insights into the importance of identifying these failures when sharing knowledge and propose relevant mitigation strategies. Originality/value: This paper identifies a range of empirically validated CFFs that complement the extant work on the complexity of knowledge sharing and have hitherto not been seen in the literature. It also provides a more nuanced understanding of why both organizations and their people often fail to share knowledge by exploring the role of organizational ignorance

Servitization and operations management: a service-dominant logic approach

Authors' pre-print draft; earlier version issued as working paper. Final version published in International Journal of Operations & Production Management. Available online at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/The accepted author manuscript version is in ORE: http://hdl.handle.net/10871/31585Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide further insight into operations management of the product-service (P-S) transition, known as servitization, and the resulting product service system (PSS) offerings. In exploring the P-S transition, this paper adopts a service-dominant (S-D) logic view of value creation, using it as a lens through which to explore value propositions of the P-S transition and their operations design. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents an in-depth case study of an original equipment manufacturer of durable capital equipment who, over the last five years, has expanded its offerings to include use- and result-orientated PSS. The research design uses a multi-method approach; employing 28 in-depth qualitative interviews with customers and employees and analysis of texts, documents and secondary data including five years of enterprise resource planning (ERP), call centre and contract data. Findings – The paper identifies ten generic P-S attributes that are abstracted into four nested value propositions: asset value proposition; recovery value proposition; availability value proposition; and outcome value proposition. In examining the operations design for delivery of these value propositions, it is found that the role and importance of contextual variety increases as the organisation moves through the value propositions. Interdependencies amongst the value propositions and differences in operational design for each value proposition are also found. Research limitations/implications – The paper investigates PSS through a S-D logic mindset. First, the paper considers value propositions of PSS not according to “product” or “service” but in terms of how resources (both material and human) are optimally designed to co-create customer value. Second, a value co-creation system of nested value propositions is illustrated. In so doing, the findings have a number of implications for literature on both PSS and S-D logic. In addition, the research adds to the PSS literature through the identification and consideration of the concept of contextual use variety. Practical implications – The paper demonstrates the complexity of the transition from product to service. Specifically, service cannot be seen as a bolt-on extra to their product offering; complexity caused by interactions and changes to the core offering require a systems perspective and consideration of both firm and customer skills and resources. Originality/value – This paper extends existing literature on the P-S transition and its implications for operations management. Notably, it takes an S-D logic perspective of value creation and in so doing highlights the importance and role of contextual use variety in the P-S transition. It also provides further empirical evidence that the P-S transition cannot be treated as discrete stages but is evolutionary and requires a complex systems perspectiv

An Investigation of Air Force Communities of Practice: A Descriptive Study of Evolution through Assessment of People, Process, and Technology Capabilities

A variety of theories state that communities of practice (CoPs) evolve or mature through various stages over time. Such theories posit that each stage is characterized by different people, process, and technology attributes/capabilities that ultimately necessitate differing strategies for achieving effectiveness (Gongla and Rizzuto, 2001). A primary goal of AFMC/DRW, AFMC Electronic Learning (eLearning) Knowledge Management Integrated Project Team, and the office of the Air Force Chief Information Officer is to increase CoP participation and effectiveness. This descriptive, cross-sectional research, surveyed all CoP managers of all CoPs hosted by AFMC/DRW with a quantitative/qualitative, 86 question, 5-point Likert, survey. This research suggested that, on average, AF/AFMC CoPs are in the very early stages of evolution, and the extent of implementation for stage-specific attributes/capabilities was found to be minimal. The implications of this finding show, given the relatively undeveloped nature of many of the CoPs, there are a wide range of actions that can be taken to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of existing CoPs. These actions include increasing leadership involvement and support, increasing membership education and training, defining more clearly the purpose/objectives of each CoP, and implementing easier technology tools for navigating the COP collaborative electronic workspace