User-centric development is essential to any product development project, especially in order to keep up with today's ever-changing product cycle.

This paper explores the potential of combining specific aspects of Scrum and Design Thinking to maximise user integration as well as implementing short iterations in hardware development projects, in this use case a three-month development project at a German high-end homeware manufacturer. In addition to observations regarding the application of those approaches this paper will then offer a range of newly developed user-centric methods to efficiently integrate the user's perspective in future development projects, as well as feedback from the product developers at the company and comparisons to current methods.

This use case was furthermore able to illustrate how the employment of such methods made short and sprint-like development cycles within hardware development attainable.

These user-centric methods developed within the use case can be applied to future application- and user- oriented projects in order to speed up the product development process and ensure that the product or service matches the users’ needs and desires.

The development of mechatronic systems has always been characterized by continuous handling of uncertainties. This challenge, which is associated with dynamic changes in the development context, is increasingly met by companies in the development of physical systems with the implementation of agile approaches in their development processes. However, since established approaches have their origin in software development, they reach various limits in the context of the development of mechatronic systems, e.g. due to the physical properties of the systems. Other features, such as transparent and flexible project management or targeted and early involvement of customers and users in development processes, can also be implemented in mechatronic system development. In order to derive the potentials and limits of existing agile approaches for the context of mechatronic system development, the present paper compares existing approaches with regard to relevant factors from the context of mechatronic system development. The aim is to create a basis for the targeted development, adaptation and use of agile approaches in the field of mechatronic system development.

Originally developed for the software industry, agile development is being applied in the hardware field nowadays as well due to its benefits when having to deal with volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) conditions. However, certain complications arise when applying the concept of agility in the hardware. In this publication, based on the challenges identified by Ovesen in 2012, the current challenges of agile development for hardware are gathered using an embedded design approach, ensuring its actuality based on the latest surveys and empirical data. The current state regarding the challenges is displayed and its interrelations as well as their advancements compared to seven years ago is discussed. Moreover, an attempt to explain the difficulties of applying agile development is given by a hardware-related complexity model.

Despite the increasing demand to develop cross-disciplinary research projects, designing collaborative research still prove to be difficult due to both scientific specialization and organizational issues. In this paper, we explore how innovative design dynamics can be developed between researchers to collectively build research projects that could become common purposes for collaboration. This work relies on a case study led with the newly formed Eco&Phy research team, who applied an innovative design process to initiate collaboration and design its scientific agenda for the next 5 years. This process was built based on both KCP and matching-building methodologies: it included an initialization phase, during which the team strategically chose topics to be explored, and exploration phases, during which researchers collectively developed new knowledge and concepts to build cross-disciplinary projects. At the end of the design process, the team had developed two new research lines that were integrated in its official agenda. In conclusion, the article discusses the relevance of design approaches to develop original collaborative research through dedicated innovation processes.

Risk management (RM) in new product development (NPD) is often implemented as a standardized framework and ends up being carried out as a tick the box, non-value adding activity. To avoid this problem, RM needs to be tailored to the organization and NPD project. This paper identifies a gap in both understanding and facilitating tailoring, i.e. design of RM systems in NPD. To understand how to design RM systems, we must better understand how RM adds value to NPD activities. We applied Product Development Value Stream Mapping (PDVSM) to RM and conceptualized a Risk Value Stream Mapping (RVSM) framework to support design. Through a state-of-the-art literature review, we identified typical categories of value and waste in RM as well as approaches to model the RM in NPD. We developed and tested components of the RVSM framework based on PDVSM in three case companies. In this paper, results are presented regarding waste, value and potential ways to model the value stream in RM. The framework enables a diagnosis of the current state of RM in companies and supports future design activities pertaining to RM systems. This paper is positioned at the intersection of design, lean thinking and RM

Analyzing value creation and capture mechanisms of open source hardware startup companies, this paper illustrates how an open source strategy can make economical sense for hardware startups. By interviewing 37 open source hardware company leaders, 12 company community members as well as analyzing forum data of 3 open source hardware companies; we realize that by open sourcing the design of hardware, a company can naturally establish its community, which is a key element for a company's success. Establishing a community can increase customer perceived value, decrease product development and sales cost, shorten product go-to-market time, and incubate startups with knowledge, experience and resources. These advantages can compensate for the risks associated with open source strategies and can make open source design a viable product development strategy for hardware startups.

Patent retrieval and analytics have become common tasks in engineering design and innovation. Keyword-based search is the most common method and the core of integrative methods for patent retrieval. Often searchers intuitively choose keywords according to their knowledge on the search interest which may limit the coverage of the retrieval. Although one can identify additional keywords via reading patent texts from prior searches to refine the query terms heuristically, the process is tedious, time-consuming, and prone to human errors. In this paper, we propose a method to automate and augment the heuristic and iterative keyword discovery process. Specifically, we train a semantic engineering knowledge graph on the full patent database using natural language processing and semantic analysis, and use it as the basis to retrieve and rank the keywords contained in the retrieved patents. On this basis, searchers do not need to read patent texts but just select among the recommended keywords to expand their queries. The proposed method improves the completeness of the search keyword set and reduces the human effort for the same task.

This paper provides a preliminary assessment of the literature available in the field of External Technology Searching. Many methods exist to enable companies to take advantage of new technologies and apply them to achieve a competitive advantage. This literature review focuses on reducing complexity and providing clarity related to the numerous different terms and methodologies used throughout the literature. The main methods found in the literature include: Technology Foresight, Technology Forecasting, Technology Intelligence, and Technology Scouting. However, many additional terms have also been used to describe similar strategies, leading to inconsistency in the use of the terms, resulting in confusion and missed opportunities to innovate for those trying to navigate the field. Synthesis of the results assists in clarifying the differences and conflicts in the literature between the numerous terms. The results serve to display the state of the art on the field and present a basis for further research.

Small and medium-sized enterprises are affected by changing development, production and selling paradigms in globalized industries, where innovation is a driver for sustainable competitiveness. However, innovating is highly challenging for small and medium-sized enterprises, as human resources are very limited and know-how are often highly specialized. It is often unclear which fields and factors provide the capability to innovate and which measures or methods can be applied to promote innovation based on existing competencies.

For this reason, the aim of this paper is to present a framework to support the innovation capability of SMEs by identifying promising fields for innovation and providing suitable innovation methods. A particular focus in this paper is a methodology for the description and identification of fields to foster the innovation capability in SMEs as a part of the introduced framework.

It is an agreed fact among scholars that services are more sustainable compared to the products. By offering services, traditional companies can lock their customers into a long-term and sustainable revenue generation settlement. Available academic literature is abundant with methodologies related to service development. However, this study investigates various value adding service options related to financing and ownership of a product that can be offered on top of the existing products. It is important to understand these options from the consumer as well as supplier perspective. The most well established options available for financing/ownership are compiled, and sorted with respect to intangibility, ownership, financing and value addition scale. The study argues that the identified options incrementally add value to the existing offering by increasing the purchasing power and reducing the ownership obstacles for the customers. However, for the supplier, the decision depends on the trade-off between value addition for the customers and the business model changes required.

In order to be as responsive as possible to changes in the dynamic context of mechatronic system development, companies are increasingly integrating agile approaches into their development processes. They are confronted with the challenges of adapting approaches that originate in software development to the conditions of physical development, without neglecting the experiences gained over many years regarding product and process knowledge. In addition, agile development approaches must be integrated into existing processes through a systematic implementation strategy. In order to gain an initial understanding of the current situation in mechatronic companies with regard to agile development approaches, an interview study was conducted with 18 participants from real development practice. This could show that the companies in mechatronic system development are currently at the beginning of agile transformation and need approaches that are modelled on the basis of real development projects and are best possible tailored to the needs of these companies through a clear technical orientation. The findings gained are not universally valid, but represent a basis for further research work.

The dichotomy of radical and incremental innovation has been discussed in numerous literature sources and a great amount of advices on how to handle them in design processes has been provided. Nevertheless, only a minority of literature sources addresses the perception of radicalism from a user's perspective, meaning that there is less research on how users or, in other words, consumers perceive a radical degree of novelty of products. Furthermore, there is little research on how this perception can be measured.

This paper discusses the aforementioned user's perception and proposes a way to derive criteria which users take into account when they decide whether an idea or an innovation is radical or incremental. A concept for an investigative model was developed and applied by using it in the field with 49 test subjects. Consequently, a set of criteria was derived which concretises the decision whether a product was radical or not. The criteria were analyzed statistically and can be used by designers planning to develop a radical innovation in order to check whether the criteria people use to differentiate between radical and incremental products are fulfilled.

Open source design of hardware products is an emerging phenomenon that takes more and more importance today's in the society. However, open source (hardware) design implies a tremendous change in both design practices and philosophy because it is partly related to the movements of creative commons and the sharing economy. From this perspective one could think that participation is crucial in the success of open source design projects. In this paper, we analyse 9 case studies in the light of 3 hypotheses. If many studies highlight the potential of the crowd as a resource for design tasks, our study shows that for open source design communities the participation is not massive. In this study, we used an activity-based approach to build our model. As open source design processes are fairly unstructured and based on voluntary participation, it is impossible to adopt a classical task-based model. With the help of this model, we were able evaluate the overall size of the active community, the participation rate with regards to the activities. This study paves the way to deeper and extensive studies on how to support communities engaged in open source design of hardware products.

Different variants of a-posteriori novelty metrics can be found in the literature. Indeed, such a kind of assessment procedures is often used to extract useful information about creativity and/or idea generation effectiveness. In particular, the metric proposed by Shah et al. in 2003, is one of the most used and discussed in the literature. However, scholars highlighted some flaws for this metric, and some variants have been proposed to overcome them. This paper argues about the variants proposed for the a-posteriori metric of Shah et al., and proposes a selection framework to support researchers in selecting the most suited for their experimental needs. The proposed selection framework also highlights important research hints, which could pave the way for future activities. More specifically, it is still necessary to support the identification of the best-suited abstraction framework to assign weights to attributes, and the assignment of weights should be better supported as well. Moreover, this paper highlights the presence of “uncommonness of key attributes”, which needs to be investigated for experimental cases where ideas missing some key attributes are present.

While the construction of knowledge hubs has gained recent traction, little is known on how networked actors perceive their collective culture. Authors looked at the topic through a single case study, the Design Factory Global Network, a network of 24 autonomous yet connected hubs for passion-based co- creation in an educational setting. Data was collected via questionnaires, asking 1) to describe their Design Factory in three distinct, words, 2) explicate these with exemplary stories, and 3) express future development wishes. 98 stories and future wishes were shared by representatives from 15 Design Factories. Excerpts reflecting cultural levels (attitudes, norms, manifestations) were identified and made sense of by looking at which level of stakeholder relationship (internal, host, network, wider environment) they targeted. 78 attitudes, 114 norms and 95 manifestations were mentioned, mostly targeting the internal community and the host levels. Authors draw some practical implications for each of the identified level or relationship, contributing to the knowledge of the creation and development of such innovation hubs. In addition, further research directions are proposed.

This paper focuses on evolving an absorptive capacity (ACAP) assessment tool designed to help firms understand their ACAP maturity in processing external knowledge. ACAP maturity is evaluated based on a firm's capacity and willingness to do relevant ACAP practices. Although an earlier version of the ACAP tool was able to evaluate maturity and highlight immature practice, it could not determine how critical these practices were for improvement action. Thus, a means of eliciting the importance of practices and aggregating it with their ACAP maturity evaluations is needed. This paper provides summaries of the subjective weight elicitation methods and aggregation techniques which were identified from the domain of multi-criteria decision making. Criteria for comparing these methods are defined and analyzed to determine the most appropriate methods for the current application. The SRF method for subjective weight elicitation, aggregated with the maturity evaluations through weight sum models, is deemed the most appropriate for the current application. During testing with users, the SRF procedure was found to suffer from various usability concerns which will be investigated in future work.

Multidisciplinary agile teams working in fast paced, delivery-oriented sprint cycles of two weeks can experience moments of stuckness. Typically, these moments can be characterised by the inability to continue, which can be quite detrimental in agile settings, where time is pressured. This paper aims to explore these moments of stuckness, to understand when and why they occur and to understand the different strategies Scrum teams use to overcome them, both on a personal as well as team level. A combination of interviews and observations were conducted with six Scrum team members and two experts to understand their process and experiences while working in an agile set up. We have identified five strategies, which strongly rely on agile values of collaboration, communication, and creativity. These are: looking for expert guidance, open communication, creating spike stories, visual communication and incubation. The findings from this study provide both practice and academia with a deeper understanding into how can creativity be supported in agile settings.

With complex technology-intense industries follows an ever-increasing need for rapid innovation processes. Yet, innovation speed and the time from idea to product realization can vary and be unpredictable.

Design Thinking (DT) is suggested as a key driver to impact the speed of product innovation within product development projects. To understand and aid the road from early ideas and concepts to value- added products, this paper will provide a literature study on how Design Thinking can facilitate improved product innovation performance through innovation speed.

The paper seeks to develop an overview of new insight on DT applicability for improved product innovation capability. This is done by identifying components that comprise DT´s innovative ability and appropriateness to product development contexts beyond the early creative phases of product development.

As DT emphasize on visualization and re-framing problems, it contributes to enhanced clarity, meaning and confidence in ideas and decisions. DT in this way may impact strategy formulation and speed up complex innovation processes by pre-experiencing future situations.

Set-Based Concurrent Engineering is commonly adopted to drive the development of complex products and systems. However, its application requires design information about a future product that is often not mature enough in the early design stages, and that it is not encompassing a service and lifecycle- oriented perspective. There is a need for manufacturers to understand, since the early design stages, how customer value is created along the lifecycle of a product from a hardware and service perspective, and how to use such information to screen radically new technologies, trade-off promising design configurations and commit to a design concept. The paper presents an approach for the multidisciplinary value assessment of design concepts in sub-systems design, encompassing the high-level concept screening and the trade-off of different design concepts, and enabling the integration of value models results into a Set-based Concurrent Engineering process. The approach is described through its application in the case study of the development of a subsystem component for a commercial aircraft engine.

The static data obtained from user research are not sufficient to accurately reflect the change of the user's needs and capabilities in different contexts. Not paying enough attention to the economic feasibility of design solutions makes inclusive design face challenges in commercialization. In this paper, the user's demand is regarded as a function of the dynamic interaction between the user's characteristics and the environment. The inclusion problem is defined from an economic perspective. By distinguishing the stages before and after the delivery of a product, different economic properties of the product are defined. Then the two stages are analysed from the perspective of investment and consumption respectively, and the competition criterion of inclusivity distribution and the reasons for exclusion are deduced. According to the causes of different problems in the two stages, the research direction of inclusive solutions is pointed out, and the economical sustainability of inclusive design is analysed. This paper emphasizes that the goal of inclusive design lies not only in the partial and temporary elimination of exclusion, but also in how to distribute the freedom of choice.