Attitude development in designer's education

Modern academic design and engineering education adopted the issues and goals of holistic development of design competence. Holistic design competence is a combination of generic capacities: capability, knowledge, skill, experience and attitude. All capacities should be addressed in academic education, but the development of attitude is not sufficiently emphasized. Designers’ attitude can be seen as the relationship between a designer and the design profession. With a good designers’ attitude, different types of design problems can be solved and all the capacities, including attitude, can be developed. This paper proposes that developing a good designers’ attitude can be implemented in design education and should be done. We present the five different elements that comprise an attitude: communication, reliability, trust, motivation and open mindset. The relations between elements of designers’ attitude and other capacities of design competence are discussed. We studied the manifestation of attitudes and their development in a project of the so called Global Product Realization (GPR) course. The GPR course incorporates students from several European universities who are asked to solve a real design problem for an industrial company. The conclusion is that this project has supported the development of all five attitudinal elements. Since GPR projects are multi disciplinary, multi cultural and communication is non face-toface, a certain level of designers’ attitude is required for such projects. Further research is needed to support the vision that development of designers’ attitude needs to be addressed earlier in design education, preferably from the very first course

An Adaptive Design Methodology for Reduction of Product Development Risk

Embedded systems interaction with environment inherently complicates understanding of requirements and their correct implementation. However, product uncertainty is highest during early stages of development. Design verification is an essential step in the development of any system, especially for Embedded System. This paper introduces a novel adaptive design methodology, which incorporates step-wise prototyping and verification. With each adaptive step product-realization level is enhanced while decreasing the level of product uncertainty, thereby reducing the overall costs. The back-bone of this frame-work is the development of Domain Specific Operational (DOP) Model and the associated Verification Instrumentation for Test and Evaluation, developed based on the DOP model. Together they generate functionally valid test-sequence for carrying out prototype evaluation. With the help of a case study 'Multimode Detection Subsystem' the application of this method is sketched. The design methodologies can be compared by defining and computing a generic performance criterion like Average design-cycle Risk. For the case study, by computing Average design-cycle Risk, it is shown that the adaptive method reduces the product development risk for a small increase in the total design cycle time.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figure

Service strategy transition : product and service offerings in medical devices

This study explores how, by undertaking customer-oriented service analysis, a company follows a non-linear approach to product-service provision which is contrary to the approach advocated in the servitisation literature. The case study verifies applicability of existing service models using the example of a global manufacturer of medical products. Open-ended interviews serve as the main source of data to reveal the change opportunities for product-service provision. Study findings suggest that customer orientation is the key element causing the change in pattern; while the analysis of consumer operations provides understanding of the planned change initiatives

Three decades of strategic management research on M&As: Citations, co-citations, and topics

Merger and acquisitions (M&As) strategies have been growingly deployed by firms for their domestic and international expansion, to redefine their business scope or take advantage of emerging opportunities. In this paper we conduct a bibliometric study of the extant strategy research on M&As, assessed by the articles published in the main journal for strategic management studies over the period 1984-2010. Results reveal the highest impact works (articles and books), the intellectual ties among authors and theories that form five main clusters of research, and the topics delved into. Performance effects, M&As as diversification strategies and RBV and capabilities-based topics have dominated the extant research. The study contributes to the extant knowledge on M&As by taking stock of the accumulated knowledge and research direction, complementing other literature reviews with a strategic management specific perspective. Thus, we provide a rear view of the field which facilitates detecting untapped gaps that may be munificent avenues for future research.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Linking corporate strategy to operations : a critical review of Prof. Kaplan’s theories and the development of a best-practice approach.

The rising speed of change in global frameworks drives international companies into a non-stop changing organization with the need of generating optimal revenues under changing conditions. Regarding to the need to be a flexible and competitive organization the value of a vision and a perfectly streamed strategy to this vision becomes a main success factor for global business. The trend for the need of development of a clear and constant strategy is equally rising with the trend of globalization and intercontinental business companies and therefor the business of strategy consulting rises constantly from the late 1990. Most of the strategy consulting companies concentrate their business on consulting companies with strategy and vision ideas and concepts with the focus on the innovation of new products and services to conquer new markets or to optimize their organizations and processes. The main focus is to provide a strategy concept with respect to cross knowledge of other industries and a set of standardized consulting methods out of their own experience or provided by research departments connected to business universities and institutes. The topic of how this strategy concept is linked to the operation business of the company is nearly never presented by these strategy consulting companies. So the result of the consulting projects is a well-defined and worked-out strategy concept, proven by the leader board but without any concept, set of methods or any approach how to realize the ideas of the concept in the “real world”. Prof. Kaplan realized this lack in the business world and provided several research papers and extended books to support companies with solutions solving this problem. Especially his latest work “The execution premium” concentrates his research on the topic how to link worked-out strategies to operations for competitive advantages. The first aim of the dissertation is to review and analyze the theories from Prof. Kaplan, focusing on “the execution premium”. As the second aim the dissertation will document the execution of his provided concepts and methods in a “real-life” experiment followed by a gap analysis of the experiment with respect to Kaplan´s theories. Finally the heart of the dissertation will be the development of a best-practice approach to fill up selected gaps and provide a general and integrated approach including a seamless-linked method tool kit for the realization of strategies in companies focusing on the field of executing the strategic initiatives

Extrusion-based additive manufacturing of concrete products. Revolutionizing and remodeling the construction industry

Additive manufacturing is one of the main topics of the fourth industrial revolution; defined as Industry 4.0. This technology offers several advantages related to the construction and architectural sectors; such as economic; environmental; social; and engineering benefits. The usage of concrete in additive technologies allows the development of innovative applications and complexity design in the world of construction such as buildings; housing modules; bridges; and urban and domestic furniture elements. The aim of this review was to show in detail a general panoramic of extrusion-based additive processes in the construction sector; the main advantages of using additive manufacturing with the respect to traditional manufacturing; the fundamental requirements of 3D printable material (fresh and hardened properties), and state-of-the-art aesthetic and architectural projects with functional properties

Transforming pedagogy using mobile Web 2.0

Blogs, wikis, podcasting, and a host of free, easy to use Web 2.0 social software provide opportunities for creating social constructivist learning environments focusing on student-centred learning and end-user content creation and sharing. Building on this foundation, mobile Web 2.0 has emerged as a viable teaching and learning tool, facilitating engaging learning environments that bridge multiple contexts. Today’s dual 3G and wifi-enabled smartphones provide a ubiquitous connection to mobile Web 2.0 social software and the ability to view, create, edit, upload, and share user generated Web 2.0 content. This article outlines how a Product Design course has moved from a traditional face-to-face, studio-based learning environment to one using mobile Web 2.0 technologies to enhance and engage students in a social constructivist learning paradigm. Keywords: m-learning; Web 2.0; pedagogy 2.0; social constructivism; product desig

Sustainability management : insights from the viable system model

A review of current literature on sustainability standards reveals a significant gap between their adoption and the implementation of sustainability into every level of the organisation. In this paper, it is argued that in order to overcome this challenge, an appropriate model of an organisation is needed. The Viable System Model (VSM) is proposed as such a model and, in order to illustrate this argument, it is used to interpret the ISO 26000 standard on Social Responsibility (SR). First, the VSM theory is introduced and presented by modelling the hypothetical company Widget Co. Then, the clauses of ISO 26000 are mapped on the Widget Co. model, together with detailed descriptions and examples on the organisational and managerial implications of its adopting the standard's guidelines. The result is the identification of generic SR functions that need to be performed by the various organisational governance systems, as well as their dynamic interrelations, thus clarifying implementation issues. Moreover, by identifying different SR management layers, VSM is suggested as a way forward to develop an integration model for SR issues and respective sustainability tools. Finally, a discussion is given on the implications of using this approach to integrate sustainability standards and the way this research contributes to recent developments in sustainability research