Platform driven development of product families : linking theory with practice

Firms in most industries increasingly are considering platform-based approaches to reduce complexity and better leverage investments in product design, manufacturing and marketing. Literature addresses a variety of concepts related to platform thinking: component standardization, product architecture, product platform, process platform, customer platform, brand platform, global platform and product family development. In our paper we provide an overview of key topics related to platform and product family development as found in literature. We also use a multiple-case approach to investigate why and how three technology-driven companies adopted platform thinking in their development process. We discuss the rationale, but also the perceived risks and associated problems behind the process to create and manage product families and their underlying platforms. In the paper we will further show that although widely advocated, the knowledge and experience of how to apply platforms and product families in product development, platform driven development of product families is still only a young emerging field, both in theory and in practice

Bridging analytical approaches for low-carbon transitions

Low-carbon transitions are long-term multi-faceted processes. Although integrated assessment models have many strengths for analysing such transitions, their mathematical representation requires a simplification of the causes, dynamics and scope of such societal transformations. We suggest that integrated assessment model-based analysis should be complemented with insights from socio-technical transition analysis and practice-based action research. We discuss the underlying assumptions, strengths and weaknesses of these three analytical approaches. We argue that full integration of these approaches is not feasible, because of foundational differences in philosophies of science and ontological assumptions. Instead, we suggest that bridging, based on sequential and interactive articulation of different approaches, may generate a more comprehensive and useful chain of assessments to support policy formation and action. We also show how these approaches address knowledge needs of different policymakers (international, national and local), relate to different dimensions of policy processes and speak to different policy-relevant criteria such as cost-effectiveness, socio-political feasibility, social acceptance and legitimacy, and flexibility. A more differentiated set of analytical approaches thus enables a more differentiated approach to climate policy making.</p

Classification of organizational failure root causes producing human error

The formal study of human error is relatively recent, especially in medical domain, and is tied closely to a several other relatively new fields. Organizational root cause of human error is less considered. Despite growing social, industrial and scientific interest in the organizational causes of incidents, the concept of organizational failure and related tools are still less considered in many developing countries e.g. Iran. Also, there is few incident record-keeping in medical domain on human error. Therefore, this study draws on case study research to investigate the applicability of a European taxonomy of organizational failure in Iran, in aviation domain with a fair incident record-keeping. This case study resulted in 10 incident in-depth descriptions, which occurred during one year in a part of civil aviation due to operator error. Within each case study, an explanation building method is used to develop a tool for classifying organizational root causes. Results include 100 root causes. The distribution of organizational root causes over the main categories of the former taxonomy shows a need to add a new sub-category to improve its applicability in Iran. The new sub-category is related to culture