Digitalization and Innovation

Developments in digital technology offer new opportunities to design new products and services. However, creating such digitalized products and services often creates new problems and challenges to firms that are trying to innovate. In this essay, we analyze the impact of digitalization of products and services on innovations. In particular, we argue that digitalization of products will lead to an emergence of new layered product architecture. The layered architecture is characterized by its generative design rules that connect loosely coupled heterogeneous layers. It is pregnant with the potential of unbounded innovations. The new product architecture will require organizations to adopt a new organizing logic of innovation that we dubbed as doubly distributed innovation network. Based on this analysis, we propose five key issues that future researchers need to explore.innovation, innovation, product architecture, design rules

Embedding employability skills in UK Higher Education: between digitalization and marketization

This article contributes to the debate on employability skills in UK higher education. It starts by discussing the concept of employability and places the debate in the context of mega-trends affecting UK higher education and the broader UK labour market. It distinguishes between different types of employability skills, as identified by employers’ surveys, and matches them with specific small-group teaching activities, drawing on pedagogic theory and practice. The article concludes that, beyond work-integrated learning, traditional small-group teaching activities can go a long way towards bridging the gap between graduates’ skills and labour market needs

Digitalization in Thermodynamics

Digitalization is about data and how they are used. This has always been a key topic in applied thermodynamics. In the present work, the influence of the current wave of digitalization on thermodynamics is analyzed. Thermodynamic modeling and simulation is changing as large amounts of data of different nature and quality become easily available. The power and complexity of thermodynamic models and simulation techniques is rapidly increasing, and new routes become viable to link them to the data. Machine learning opens new perspectives, when it is suitably combined with classical thermodynamic theory. Illustrated by examples, different aspects of digitalization in thermodynamics are discussed: strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and threats

Current Advancements of and Future Developments for Fourth Party Logistics in a Digital Future

This paper aims to analyze the potential future of the 4PL concept based on expert opinions with special regard to the influence of digitalization coming with a disruptive trans-formation of supply chains. Service arrangements, provider capabilities and benefits resulting from a 4PL partnership are compared in current and future configurations. The research follows an explorative mixed methods approach with semi structured interviews followed by an expert panel. This builds a basis for an online survey questionnaire to inquire on important future aspects for the 4PL concept by a sample of respondents from multinational companies. Our results show a clear trend away from simply organizing transportation and logistics activities towards the provision of an IT platform as well as further value-added service activities such as planning, analytics and monitoring. Along with this, IT capabilities appear to be an important differentiator for 4PL providers in the future. Moreover, relationships between 4PL providers and their clients become closer and more strategic, which leads to a customer valuing not only direct cost reductions but rather improvements resulting from optimized operations through superior analysis and planning functions

Active learning based laboratory towards engineering education 4.0

Universities have a relevant and essential key role to ensure knowledge and development of competencies in the current fourth industrial revolution called Industry 4.0. The Industry 4.0 promotes a set of digital technologies to allow the convergence between the information technology and the operation technology towards smarter factories. Under such new framework, multiple initiatives are being carried out worldwide as response of such evolution, particularly, from the engineering education point of view. In this regard, this paper introduces the initiative that is being carried out at the Technical University of Catalonia, Spain, called Industry 4.0 Technologies Laboratory, I4Tech Lab. The I4Tech laboratory represents a technological environment for the academic, research and industrial promotion of related technologies. First, in this work, some of the main aspects considered in the definition of the so called engineering education 4.0 are discussed. Next, the proposed laboratory architecture, objectives as well as considered technologies are explained. Finally, the basis of the proposed academic method supported by an active learning approach is presented.Postprint (published version

Illuminating a Blind Spot in Digitalization -- Software Development in Sweden's Private and Public Sector

As Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen famously remarked in 2011, software is eating the world - becoming a pervasive invisible critical infrastructure. Data on the distribution of software use and development in society is scarce, but we compile results from two novel surveys to provide a fuller picture of the role software plays in the public and private sectors in Sweden, respectively. Three out of ten Swedish firms, across industry sectors, develop software in-house. The corresponding figure for Sweden's government agencies is four out of ten, i.e., the public sector should not be underestimated. The digitalization of society will continue, thus the demand for software developers will further increase. Many private firms report that the limited supply of software developers in Sweden is directly affecting their expansion plans. Based on our findings, we outline directions that need additional research to allow evidence-informed policy-making. We argue that such work should ideally be conducted by academic researchers and national statistics agencies in collaboration

Posthumanist Education

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