Numerous researchers and practitioners emphasize the potential to create value through sustainable business models (SBMs). However, little attention has been paid to how sustainable value is proposed, created, delivered, and captured in the organization, and how customers perceive sustainable value in service. The aim of this paper is to explore this research gap empirically through a case study of sustainable value (co-)creation through SBMs of sustainable service innovations as experienced among two hotels' managers, employees and customers. The contributions of the study relate to the development of SBMs in service, where the value processes happen simultaneously and where the element value perception has to be added to the extant SBM literature, which is closely related to the creation and delivery of physical goods as in product-oriented industries. The study also contributes through the dual perspective (providers and customers) on sustainable value proposition, value creation and value capture. The findings reveal different key aspects in creating and capturing sustainable value through SBMs and sustainable service innovation. The managerial implications for creating and implementing SBM in service stress the need for employee engagement, customer involvement and targeted and personal communication educating internal and external sustainability ambassadors.
A number of researchers and practitioners emphasize the potentials of creating value through sustainable business models. However, little attention has been paid as to how sustainable value is created and implemented into the organization and how sustainable value is perceived by the customers. This research gap is explored empirically through a case study of active facilitation and implementation of sustainable business models as experience internally and externally among two hotels’ employees and customers. The findings reveal different key control mechanisms in sustainable value creation and value capture through sustainable business models and sustainable service innovation. The managerial implications of creating and implementing sustainable business models in ways that are perceived sustainable by customer, stress the need for employee engagement, customer involvement, and targeted and personal communication educating internal and external sustainability ambassadors.
Management control systems offers powerful ways of guiding employee behavior and implementing organizational strategy. Given the new business logic and the extensive and complex challenges that industrial firms face in light of a circular economy transition, this paper is oriented around two questions. First, the compatibility between traditional management control systems and circular economy. Second, how management control systems can support the radical transformation of firms that circular economy entails. By scrutinizing extant research on MCS, six propositions are developed and grounded in empirical illustrations. These propositions hold relevant implications for practitioners, and several promising avenues for future research are highlighted.
A circular economy (CE) transition poses new challenges and opportunities for industrial incumbents. When implementing CE, the existing processes, routines, and behaviors are questioned. As such, practitioners must consider the required changes related directly to CE and contextual factors in managing the transition. For this purpose, this study conceptualizes a maturity model, highlighting critical elements to consider to facilitate the transition. The model builds on both state-of-the-art literature in CE and empirical findings from three large industrial firms.
The proposed model consists of the CE practices:
and the management practices:
The model is intended to help practitioners define a CE roadmap to facilitate the transition towards a more circular business.
Circular economy (CE) is gaining interest among industrial firms in light of sustainability concerns, and several incumbent firms are integrating it into their strategy. In this study, we scrutinize learnings from three large established industrial firms with a clear CE agenda and that are front-runners in CE strategy deployment. We analyze exploitation and exploration approaches to CE and problematize how these approaches relate to radical innovation, which we argue is critical for achieving CE. Semi-structured interviews (n = 30) were used to collect data. We found several issues referring to
Overall, current exploitative approaches are favored over explorative, mirroring an undesired imbalance between the two. We suggest several ways to counteract this. For example,
The current linear system of extract-produce-consume-dispose poses considerable challenges for achieving sustainability goals and will eventually lead to the depletion of non-renewable natural resources. Circular Economy (CE) is promoted as a possible sustainable way forward. The suggested transition questions society at large and the business-as-usual of existing firms in particular.
Barriers to CE implementation have become a growing stream of literature across several sectors and relating to different levels of society. However, this emerging stream of research and how it handles issues of management appears not to be helpful to managers and organizations. This study is, therefore, a systematic review of the current state-of art of circular economy barriers where we scrutinize issues related to management. Attention is brought to matters concerning innovation in management, in particular, business model innovation and innovation ecosystems.
Our findings suggest that these topics are indeed indicated as important in the CE literature, yet in very diverse ways depending on the studied case. Implications for future studies within CE are drawn, with suggested point of departure in innovation management topics.
While several existing firms have begun making changes to meet a circular economy transition, it is clear that they meet with several managerial challenges. Management control systems can help managers make the radical changes and facilitate the innovation processes that is required to meet circular economy. However, little is known about how management controls are applied in the context of a circular economy transformation, and whether traditional management controls are compatible with a circular logic. This paper aims to provide detailed and empirically based insight on these issues.
This study examined three large industrial incumbent firms to see how they utilize action-, result-, and cultural controls to implement circular economy principles, and what tensions they have experienced. We used semi-structured interviews (n=38) to collect data, and thematic analysis for the analysis.
The analysis suggests that while circular economy principles are not integrated in all parts of the management control system, there are still several factors that can both enable and impede a circular transformation. Furthermore, imbalances and inconsistencies were found concerning different types of managerial controls used. Alarmingly, circular economy initiatives are at risk of being reduced to minor incremental improvements if the radical changes needed are not better understood, and changes made to the management control system to facilitate these.
This research provides rich qualitative insights bridging the new phenomenon of circular economy adoption in incumbent firms with research on innovation management and management controls.
Barriers to access-based consumption (ABC) have been extensively studied in different strands of literature. However, cumulative knowledge is not organized to date, and a comprehensive overview of barriers identified by empirical studies in diverse strands is lacking. Such a picture is essential for laying the ground for further change-oriented research and actual changes in practice. This article reports on the results of a systematic review on barriers to transitioning from ownership- to access-based consumption. The review focuses on the literature strands product-service systems, circular economy, sharing economy, and collaborative consumption. Through open and axial coding of 289 barriers reported in 45 empirical studies, we found 17 themes of barriers concerning consumers, business, and society. The analysis of the barriers reveals four significant insights important for the research and practitioner community:
These four major insights suggest that consumers need business and government to offer enabling conditions for ABC – spanning from raising awareness and understanding to improving user experience. Furthermore, businesses need governments to create the necessary structures to support ABC offerings – from decreasing risks to increasing incentives. How and which mechanisms can further facilitate circular behaviors is a salient topic for future investigations.
This paper aims to analyze if self-evaluation of perceived productivity could help detect alarming patterns in time and stop projects from failing. The study is based on descriptive quantitative data that has been gathered continuously throughout a student engineering design project, highlighting three factors of influence; perceived productivity, perception of stage completion and work activity distribution. The productivity data was analyzed by detecting patterns in form of peaks or lows and combining the patterns with qualitative data from observations and documented work activities. Measurements were done on 33 occasions during the project where 280 individual answers for productivity (P) and completion (C) and 115 individual answers for work activity distribution were collected. The findings provide extraction of peak values and low values that enable tracking of critical incidents. Through an in-depth activity back-log each value was enriched with an understanding of what took place and its project consequences. Over time the recognized pattern helped the design team to become more proactive in activity precision and execution, resource allocation and process reflections.
A child’s playfulness and ability to fantasize are also key creative mechanisms in adulthood. Allowing low formal control functions and high self determination is valuable for intrinsic motivation, triggering new ideas, curiosity, experimentation and the desire to impact and change traditional practices – creating innovativeness. This paper sets out to do three things: provide a literature review of the different aspects and angles of knowledge- and competence learning, and the area of creative techniques and an innovative team process; offer experiences and learning from the unique case studies used; and thirdly, to present the concept of Innovopoly - a new tool to better achieve creative learning and examination in higher education through both the innovative working process and the creative process. These elements together give us the ability to discuss how higher education could best implement courses and methods in order to prepare our students for the future.
This paper is a follow-up on last year’s design steps and case studies analysis to bundle innovation skills in an educational model. In our previous research we presented the ideas and construct foundations to a game plan ideology to build up common knowledge and examine innovativeness. In this, the next phase paper, our ambitions is to deepen students’ abilities for self-governed innovative practices within a team. We have used a series of workshops with engineering design students and design students to frame and concretize the ‘Innovopoly’ educational platform. But also to find a way of communicate a coveted and sustainable knowledge and to motivate the learning since it will affect the momentum of a self-driven learning process. The implementation efforts of specific interdisciplinary design elements aim to strengthen the acknowledgement of how to perform a common and open innovative process and a holistic perspective. In order to do that, Innopoly has a three-dimensional concept based on four process phases and four different layers that can be varied according to level, how the team solves the defined task but also from the effect of an unknown factor in the game. Firstly, Innopoly put emphasis on the team process and team requirements as individual and mutual accountability, commitment to a common purpose, shared leadership and autonomy. Secondly, the game integrates the divergence of the team with a creative process where different knowledge backgrounds and experiences can open up a broader set of perspectives and refinements of ideas for each individual. Thirdly, Innopoly put the focus on external factors like working environment and visual and concrete working techniques and methods that can affect teams' work process. Fourthly, the involvement with organisations and industry in the task definition and also the idea that industry people can work together with the students when they perform the game give a realistic and up to date knowledge to the students in the learning context. The iterative process provides a greater understanding and anchoring knowledge through reflection and students' common discussion. The education model, ‘Innopoly’, builds on student-oriented learning, derived in design situations and situated practices. The ambitions to examine innovative practices are redeemed in incorporation of skills applied to manifest an autonomy level of performance and integrity. ‘Innopoly’ carries the outline logics from the innovation process – identification, research, ideation, concept, prototyping, testing and commercialization similar to the value increase as can be back traced to the original game form. The knowledge construction is supported in their performance, behaviour, thinking and reflections during all four phases. The educational prototype ‘Innopoly’ comprises of an inclination model inspired from Bloom’s taxonomy where ambitions is to prepare our students for future challenges.
Given the potential to deliver 'future wellbeing products', learning mechanisms behind the establishment of such efforts is vital. In this scenario, early efforts are manifested in prototypes that concern ergonomic and innovative product features. Prototypes are made, presented and interpreted differently by people according to their understanding and frame of reference. Newness could interchangeably be used for prototyping as it unlocks cognitive mechanisms where embedded modes, e.g. visualization and communication, enable iterative learning loop in-between peers. The freedom of its use, which depends on contextual relevance and appropriate levels, is therefore important to be aware of. Looking at an ideal, prototypes should be equally strong knowledge disseminators in education as they acted upon in industry, but are they, and how could we expand our perspective on prototyping as a mechanism for creation? This paper investigates how prototyping allows new knowledge to emerge in its implicit role as collaborative mediator. The paper conceptualizes views on prototyping based on student's perceived learning experiences and lecturer experiences from engineering design projects. In contrast to past prototyping research, this paper establishes a link between knowledge embedded perspectives relevant for prototyping and its consequences for learning.
Innovation is per se based not only on the individual problem solving, but the process from new ideas to commercialization of new products. However, in a time with rapid technology shifts and frequently altered customer requirements, creativity and more precisely the lack of useful new ideas surfacing is viewed as problematic by companies. Ways of involving creativity has been to apply idea generating (IG) methods for identification of creativity sources. This paper consists of a combined theoretical and empirical approach which aims at studying existing tests and proposing suitable creative methods to be used in higher engineering education. The authors work with an extensive capstone design course in Integrated Product Development that emphasizes systematic and parallel approaches to product development. In contrast to traditional modes and styles of teaching that make few attempts to encourage students to pursue a variety of IG methods the capstone design course in integrated product development puts a large part of the responsibility on the students. In all cases IG and use of creativity methods is a natural ingredient. Thus, students' self-regulation and insights into how to work with methods and exercises is particularly interesting as this may have an affect on managing their creative skill. Overall possible improvements in students' creative potential transcend interesting notions on capability to innovate. Thus, this paper's purpose is to investigate whether creativity as an ingredient of a student's innovation capability is influenced by using IG methods. And whether the selections made by project groups are aligned to best utilize students' creative thinking.
Industrial product development requires continuous improvements in work procedures as a result of constantly changing demands. Support tools have proven to be an oft chosen way to meet new demands; however, few research efforts have been made in how to implement new tools. This article is a contribution to knowledge on carrying out the implementation of support tools. The basis consists of four field studies performed during 1994–1999, containing 78 qualitative research interviews and focusing on the implementation and use of different support tools. A re-analysis has been performed of selected interviews from the field studies, in total 30 interviews. This resulted in recommendations for an implementation framework, consisting of an Implementation Cycle, Organizational Change Field and Managerial Consistence, and five implementation keys: Goal setting, Knowledge Development, Anchoring at All Levels, Suitable Resources and Focus on the Individual.
This paper describes and analyses an exploration-capability model that is currently being introduced in an automotive OEM. An increasingly high environmental dynamism as well as a new level of competition in the automotive industry call for an improved capability to explore and realise more radical innovations to complement the established OEMs exploitation skills and present focus on incremental innovation. The model that is target for the study offers the employees in the OEM five different forms of interactions with start-ups as a way to develop the capability to explore. The different forms of interaction are found to make use of different modes of balancing ambidexterity and to introduce different means to improve and establish individual, entrepreneurial skills, as well as influence the innovation culture of the OEM. The paper lays the foundation for future research by describing how and why an OEM is designing a new model to develop its exploration capability through interacting with start-ups by analysing the model in relation to theory, and presenting propositions that will act as a baseline for further studies.
The automotive industry is in a time of great environmental change. Due to new competitors and new technologies, the established OEMs are looking for ways to increase their exploration capability. One of the measures that are taken is the collaboration with start-ups.
Within this study 13 interviews were performed and analyzed to see the effects of these collaborations. The objective was to see what challenges the employees of the OEM were facing and how they were acting during these collaborations with a focus on if these behaviors were entrepreneurial.
Different challenges were found. Lack of organizational support, bureaucracy, hierarchy, and processes, the motivation of employees, as well as the experience at the company. Employees showed entrepreneurial behavior in two different ways during the collaborations. By being an ambassador for the start-up within the corporation and by adapting ways of working from the start-ups.
The goal of this research is to see which challenges the individuals on the OEM’s side meet during asymmetrical collaborations and which approaches they use to overcome them.
Literature was focused very much on the managerial view of solving challenges in these collaborations. This study shows that individuals could play a major role in resolving challenges that occur in asymmetrical collaborations. The profound effect of individuals could resemble that of individuals in other fields, e.g. champions in innovation.
To gain insight, 34 interviews within an automotive OEM were performed with project leaders of collaborations that were done with start-ups. These interviews were investigated by coding. These codes were analyzed once via text mining to get an overarching view, and once with traditional coding to get more nuanced and detailed insights.
Four major challenges were found. Mismatches in processes, lack of time and capacity, potentially unknown stakeholders, and the assessment of the start-up. These challenges were approached through a variety of measures by the interviewees. Coaching the start-up, designing a proof-of-project, using the personal network, effective communication, explaining and shielding of the start-up, and implementing new processes in the start-up. The role that is described by these tasks shall be called the ambassador role. Implementing this role in a company enables individuals to facilitate asymmetrical collaborations. However, it is suggested that there should also be an institution established that is aware of the best-practices and therefore able to educate new ambassadors.
Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is about how companies evaluate, select and prioritize ideas and projects for developing new products. This is aimed to align development investments with company's strategic goals and to reduce the risk caused by uncertainty. Research regarding the procedural aspects of PPM is still considered not enough developed. It is needed a better theoretical ground about which organizational processes should be included in PPM, how they influence each other, and how a work procedure should be designed for suiting a specific company. This paper focuses on understanding the characteristics of processes and activities within PPM. It is grounded on an empirical study in three companies based on qualitative research inter-views. It was found that that processes within PPM have five main characteristics: reciprocal influence, parallel running, network of actors, multiple decision levels and decision-realization gap. It is also discussed the implications of these findings for the design of work procedures for PPM.
This paper examines the problems decision makers experience when selecting and prioritizing new ideas and development projects. It is based on an explorative study, with interviews carried out in three companies that have new product development as a core competitive factor.
The findings indicate that to deal with all the situations and problems that may arise in the innovation process, various approaches for making decisions and understanding innovation are needed. However, regardless of the appropriateness of these approaches for given circumstances, they receive different levels of acceptance at an organizational plane. This puts decision makers in the conflictive situation of sometimes having to use approaches to work that are appropriate but not accepted, and other times accepted but inappropriate. Furthermore, an organization's potential to create new products, and consequently its future competitiveness, depends on how its members deal with the organizational acceptance of the approaches used.
We discuss the implications of these findings for designing work procedures for selecting and prioritizing ideas and projects.
This paper aim to identify and investigate a group of potential adopters that are compatible with Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) in terms of range and charging, a group labeled as BEV Compatible (BEV-C). The results reveal that the BEV-C group constitutes 14 % of new vehicle buyers and that their intention to adopt BEVs are stronger compared to the non BEV-C group. The BEV-C group can be characterized as individuals that are less likely to conduct occasional longer drives (over 150 km), perceive BEVs more positively, have higher environmental awareness and have been exposed to more BEV information compared to the non BEV-C group.
The aim of this paper is to explore how mainstream vehicle buyers perceive and apply Total Cost of Ownership in their vehicle choice process. All else equal, rational consumers ought to evaluate Total Cost of Ownership in order to acquire the real cost of owning a particular vehicle under consideration, unless bounded rationality is affecting their behavior. The results reveal that vehicle buyers generally are capable of understanding the relative size of indi- vidual costs that make up vehicle Total Cost of Ownership but fail to evaluate and apply multiple costs in their vehicle purchase process. Regression analysis exposes that income, educational level, stated importance of Total Cost of Ownership and the number of vehicles in the choice set have a positive asso- ciation with the degree that consumers conduct an evaluation of vehicle Total Cost of Ownership. Failure to consider Total Cost of Ownership can lead to uneconomic vehicle choices, which is here labeled as the TCO paradox. This could have an especially negative effect on the diffusion of battery electric ve- hicles, which require a more detailed cost analysis in order to extract its low operating cost structure.
Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) have been slow to diffuse on the international as well as the Swedish market. Previous studies have indicated situational factors such as economic factors, size and performance to be of major importance for vehicle purchasers in their choice of vehicle. In this paper, the authors explore a consumer centric total cost of ownership (TCO) model to investigate the possible discrepancy between purchase price and the TCO between internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs), hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) and BEVs. The creation and testing of the TCO model reveals that computation could be a challenging task for consumers due to bounded access of relevant data and the prediction of future conditions. The application of the model to the vehicle sample found that BEVs could be cheaper compared to ICEVs and HEVs. The findings in this paper could prove to be of importance for policy and marketing alike in designing the most appropriate business models and information campaigns based on consumer conditions in order to further promoting the diffusion of BEVs in society.
Battery Electric Vehicles have been slow to diffuse on the international as well as the Swedish market. Existing literature have pointed to situational factors such as economical factors, size and performance to be of high importance for car purchasers in their choice of car. In this paper the authors investigates the apparent discrepancy between purchase price and the Total Cost of Ownership between Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles and Battery Electric Vehicles. The Total Cost of Ownership computation reveals that Battery Electric Vehicles can be cost competitive with Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles, a significant finding that could prove to be of importance for the diffusion of Battery Electric Vehicles, although further studies are needed to test car purchasers' knowledge regarding the Total Cost of Ownership analysis.
This paper reports the results of and conclusions drawn from a questionnaire survey concerning the use and implementation of computer-aided design (CAD) in the Swedish furniture industry. The main question areas were how far the Swedish furniture industry has progressed in the use of CAD in product development, and how implementation has been performed. It was regarded as important to find out what impacts implementation has on the usage of CAD and whether companies in the furniture industry think the use of CAD could improve their product development. More than half of all product-developing companies in the Swedish furniture industry are using CAD today, and an increasing number of companies are implementing it. The furniture industry has come rather far in the use of CAD, but it could be better at implementing the systems in a proper manner. This could be related to companies often not planning their implementation; accordingly, they do not examine issues like organizational needs and goals, what the tool might be used for, and the resources required. The study found that the following factors are involved in successful implementation: management support, realistic budgeting, selection of system, and effective, company-specific training. Most CAD users are satisfied with their system and think that it fulfills their needs. Many of the difficulties referred to by respondents can be related to the implementation phase, and they could be avoided. In general, the furniture industry considers that CAD improves their product development work.
This paper presents a computer-based environmental tool that will make it possible for product designers to integrate environmental assessments into their work. The environmental tool described in this paper is a concept for integrated environmental assessment functions in design and product development tools. The concept presents a way of reducing modelling time by making simplified assessments. The concept, and finally the environmental tool, is based upon companies' demands and wishes regarding how a tool for making environmental assessments during the product development process might be useful for them. The intended user is the company product designer.
The paper presents results from a retrospective case study in the automotive industry with the purpose to identify dependencies in product concept decisions taking into consideration social aspects, decision structures and technology. Interviews and document reviews, such as gate reports and design reviews, formed the empirical base. The company in question has a documented and mandatory product development process with defined instructions, process maps and a basic chain of command. In spite of the operational support, the company still suffers from a certain amount of rework based on incorrect concept decisions. Results from the empirical study show how both formal and informal factors did affect the concept decision in the studied case.
This paper discuss the planning and organising of research conducted by Industrial PhD students, i.e. PhD students conducting research studies aiming for a PhD while employed in industrial companies. Industrial PhD projects within engineering design research in Sweden can be considered a phenomenon, i.e. existing but sparsely documented. This paper provides empirical illustrations by presenting three Industrial PhD projects conducted in three companies with product developing operations in Sweden. The specific research design of Industrial PhD projects provides benefits such as an effective bridging between academia and industry. Additionally, this type of research projects face challenges, such as having two-folded aims of the project: both academic and industrial goals. Based on experiences from these projects, implications for planning and organising of future Industrial PhD projects are discussed. Finally, we suggest that Industrial PhD projects are effective means, if used properly, for assimilation of research findings to industry, and for academia to understand the industrial practice.
This paper investigates the practice of concept decision-making, i.e. making decisions on technical solutions in early product development stages. An empirical study was conducted in a Swedish automotive company, using a qualitative approach. The study reveals that a major challenge in concept decision-making is to achieve compatibility between systems in the product before the system solutions are completely developed. Managers and product developers need to know that conceptual solutions are good enough to progress into detailed development without performing detailed analysis. In the concept-decision process a number of intrinsic conflicts that these actors have to address are identified: understanding of the overall development process as iterative or stepwise; developing satisfying or optimized solutions; using defined or interpreted criteria when comparing solutions; and composing a complete car from different systems solutions, prioritizing project targets or long-term system targets. Consequences of these intrinsic conflicts, omnipresent in the process, are characterized and discussed. The authors suggest a number of means to address these intrinsic conflicts, such as enhancing actors' awareness of psychological biases. The authors also suggest to have clear and well-communicated visions regarding both product and development process, in order to guide individuals' daily judgments and trade-offs that have to be made.
Concept development is a key success factor in product development and in theory concept development means that a number of concept solutions are generated and evaluated in an objective way using a systematic evaluation method. This paper presents identified deficiencies in both theoretical models and industrial product development. The aim is to supplement previous research, by increasing the understanding of how concept decisions are managed in product development in practice, in order to suggest proposals for improvement of management procedures. Empirical studies have been performed in two large product developing companies that act on the global market. The results imply that actors in the concept development, instead of evaluating different alternatives (as recommended in theory), rather are struggling with developing a solution that will fulfill the specifications. Decisions concerning concepts are found to be embedded in a complex weave of actors and activities that characterizes concept development. It is concluded that changes are required in theory as well as in working procedures in practice in order to actually support the actors in product development.
One way for the automotive industry to cope with the demand of a more structured information handling is to adjust model-based development (MBD) to multidisciplinary needs. Many of the issues faced in this transition are as much organizational and managerial as they are technical. In a case study carried out at a global automotive manufacturer a project to improve the electrical and electronics (EE) development has been followed and analyzed. The project originated from different needs identified by management in their ongoing work effort towards MBD as well as by developers who experienced that tools did not support their work situation. This paper describes how the introduction of a new tool support was made in a project carried out within EE development, further it reports on benefits achieved by using the tool. Both the effect on the work of affected EE developers and the expansion of a new information model are discussed, leaving important implications for management. Success keys for putting new support tools into practice are identified here and include; a bottom-up approach, user involvement from the beginning, focus on the individual needs and adaptation to current work practice. Further, management support and adequate resources are essential for extracting long-term benefits.