The objective of the Collaborative Research Center 768 "Managing Cycles in Innovation Processes – Integrated Development of Product-Service Systems Based on Technical Products" is the handling and design of innovation processes while taking into account cyclic influencing factors, in order to enable companies to successfully persist on the market. The focus of the observed market offer of the companies are combined product offering and service provision, the so-called "Product Service System" (PSS).
Cycles are described as recurring patterns – temporal and structural ones – which influence the factors on the innovation process internally and externally within the company. A cycle is characterized by its trigger, phases, duration and effect. Examples for cycles internally within the company are planning and development cycles, recurring processes (e.g. change processes) or changes within the organizational structure and team changes. The external cycles in the form of, for example, customer demand coverage, innovation cycles at the market or new product and production technologies, influence the innovation process. Within this innovation process, the different internal and external cycles underlie numerous, partly temporal entanglements and dependencies. Companies are facing the challenge to successfully act and react in a conflicting environment, which is highly impacted by internal and external cycles along the innovation process. The increasing global competition moreover requires companies to decrease the length of their innovation cycles, to lower the timespan for acquiring new innovations or to shorten the time to integrate novel technologies. In addition, the necessary coordination and communication effort increases, because the number of subject areas and qualified personal involved in the innovation process rises, especially if companies transform themselves from product providers to PSS providers. As a consequence, the successful management of cycles within innovation processes is becoming more and more important for the companies in order to successfully persist in the related market and to stay competitive. Therefore the cross-disciplinary goal of the CRC 768 is to gather and to analyze the dependencies of the several internal and external cycles in the innovation process of PSS and to develop methods, models and tools, which empower companies towards a cycle oriented design of the innovation process.
Subprojects of the Institute of Automation and Information Systems in the CRC 768
- A6: Assistance system to support the cycle management in the development and use phase of PSS innovation processes through self-maintenance of mechatronic modules
- D1: Support for shaping PSS innovation processes through diagnosis and resolution of inconsistencies be-tween models from different domains
- D2: Action goal oriented interactive visualization of model dependencies to reduce complexity in the cycle-oriented transdisciplinary design of PSS innovation processes
- T3: Model-based cycle-oriented decision making support in early phases of PSS innovation processes under specific consideration of the technical disciplines
- Z: Administration
Project sponsor
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - DFG
Coordinator of the CRC 768 / SFB768:
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Birgit Vogel-Heuser, vogel-heuser@tum.de