Abstract not only influence on development of basic industries in a country but relate with business cycle. Hi-tech industries grow rapidly and play a key role with ¡§innovation¡¨ in stock market. The trends of hi technology make people forget that traditional industries not only keep existing but play a great role of economic activities. Historically speaking, Electric wire and cable industries still exist and even stably develop.¡C I hope to apply the following theories including innovation management, dependence of resources and product life cycle to explain why traditional industries are not sunset industries. Besides, I also chose Feng-chin Corporation as a case with best skills at magnet wire manufacturing to explain how a company keeps his competitive advantages in the matured market. Through case study and theory applied, the followings are concluded. 1. With less possibilities the products are replaced, the greater possibilities of continuity of the industry. In aspects of attributes of product itself, no alternatives appear to substitute for the copper and therefore the magnet wire industry would not disappear as the raw materials with the copper. Even though we can find the new material to replace the copper, the magnet wire industry will still exist with other alternative to replace the copper. When PLC model are applied, the products with greater continuity represent highly matured products. Hence, the products with greater continuity have the following characteristics including less possibilities to be replaced, highly matured and unclear decline stage, and high dependence of the below companies. 2. In low value added industries, individual company should emphasize on process innovation and diversified customers. The Feng-chin Corporation struggles to innovate technologically and in process by the following ways. (1) They make traditional products into hi-technology industries by raise added values. (2) They concentrate on costing down and their own field (3) They well utilize their resources to enforce the mutual-depend relationship with the below companies. Likewise, in the industries which pursue economic scales to reduce the cost, it is more important to diversify the costumers when they have the following characteristics including high matured products, high pricing products and lower mobility of the equipments. Key words: innovation management product life cycle magnet wire industry continuity

Abstract An organization with high creativity can always form an awareness momentum while pursuing its mission. Its creativity helps it to conquer obstacles and obtain sustained competitiveness for survival. The factors and circumstances of operating a business are variable. The management should treasure any creativity or new ideas that will improve the organization. The creativity and new ideas may cover the fields of strategy management, leadership management, technological research, organization restructure, marketing and operation control. These are the basis to improve the performance of a business. This research focused on the real cases of the 6 subsidiaries of China Steel Corporation, including the businesses of shipping, venture capital, steel trading, security surveillance, recreational, real estate, information management and services. The analysis of this research, through in-depth interview on key issues, studied how the companies applied their industrial advantages to create their innovative management ability. This research not only analyzes the relationship of creativity with "business characters", "industry environment", and "mission strategy", but also analyzes the business competitiveness which is created by the management renovation. Hope the suggestions concluded by these analyses would provide some helps to the studied business and the follow-up researchers.

ABB Corporation is a swedish-swiss international company, specializing in power and automation technologies. The company is a joint-venture between ASEA and Brown Bouveri, merging into one company in 1988. ABB has five business unit, where the products and services mainly comes from research and development work within the company. Each business unit performs R&D initiatives and investments within respective area of reach, in order to achieve competitive products and services. ABB Corporate Research is responsible for research and development within the company where R&D initiative takes place. During autumn 2013 ABB Corporate Research will launch an improvement study, which will be the basis for subsequent major project. Information is a key factor within ABB Corporate Research, where each stakeholder in a specific project has access for specific information. The question is, how accessible/searchable is the information, and also how user-friendly is the current information system within the unit.   The mission of the conducted study is to examine what the employees of ABB Corporate Research think about the existing information distribution system for technical reports and publications, also propose overview improvements within the particular area. Delimitation has been established to conduct the study within the department of Software Architecture & Usability (SARU) in Västerås, which is a part of Automation Technology (AT) department, in order to deliver on the required time frame.   Theories regarding Innovation management, Lean thinking, Change management, Information distribution, Integration of information system and Ishikawa was studied thoroughly within the project. A qualitative research methodology was used, based on performing interviews with key personnel within SARU. The interviews converted into key factors (findings), which resulted into correlations to all key factors. A root cause analysis (Ishikawa) was performed, in order to examine and visualize which challenges appear within the current information system.   The result from the conducted analysis and correlations indicates that: the database is not user-friendly enough, it is difficult to acquire correct information, information is not in detail level due to limitation of information, it is time consuming to search in the databases in order to acquire correct information, Usually rely on internal networking instead of searching into the information system, restricted internal security and person based information dependence.   With the help of theories within the project, in combination with the conducted results from the analysis and correlations, improvements have been proposed. Due to the time frame of the project, further analysis should be performed for respective improvement proposals. The improvement proposals could be a starting point for the upcoming project. The improvements proposals are:   RSS Feeds solution for usability efficiency Standardized Work Methodology Integrated Database Interface Internal Information Transparency   The authors recommend implementing all improvement proposals, in order to further achieve productivity and efficiency within the organization.

The proposed research aspires to provide new insight on issues of applied Roadmapping and advance the state of the art in Roadmapping and its practice. It provides a conceptual model and an integrated process framework for the development of a Third Generation, Meso-level, Co-innovation Dynamic Roadmapping (from now on called ‘Dynamic Roadmapping’), which integrates policy, research, industry, and organisational roadmapping methodologies, in order to manage the development and adoption of systemic innovations in complex domains. It has been developed to meet the needs of increasingly complex systemic innovations where multiple organisations are involved as co-innovators and many other intermediaries and decision makers need to be included in the innovation adoption process. These types of innovations are usually driven by the interplay of multi-dimensional and cross-impacting factors derived from changes in social, market, economic, political and technology systems. Thus, the ‘Dynamic Roadmapping’ does not presuppose a single desired future for complex domains, but several futures, based on the complementary strategic perspectives of inter-dependent stakeholders, which need to be contextualised and negotiated at various sectoral, national and regional levels in order to be adopted. The ‘Dynamic Roadmapping’ approach supports the achievement of the realisation of the desired futures through two main components: a ‘co-innovation group’ and an ‘observatory function’. The co-innovation group is formed from all the necessary co-innovators, adopters, decision makers and users that are needed in order for the innovations to be developed and adopted. Their function is predominately ‘normative’ describing “what they want to happen” and “how” it will happen. The observatory function provides foresight and sense making methodologies to the co-innovation group, in order to constantly review and adapt their roadmaps in light of the emerging changes that can impact the roadmaps’ realisation and adoption. A conceptual model and its theoretical grounding have been built in order to bridge support for roadmapping activities among different innovative communities (e.g. in policy, research, industry and practice) and foster their collaboration via stakeholders’ innovation networks. The proposed conceptual model and its process framework have been evaluated in a case study in order to establish its validity in the European context and provide implications to theory and practice. A pilot of this framework is first implemented for the area of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). The impact of this research is: - Managing uncertainty in Future planning - Managing and implementing emergent Roadmaps for systemic innovations - Monitoring and adapt the produced Roadmaps according to change factors in emerging reality - Ensure their adoption in complex domain This research work has been funded by an EU Marie-Curry Fellowship grant via the DYRECT project no. 255182. The proposed integrated framework has been adopted by the EU TEL-Map project (in education sector) and EU CRe-AM project (in creative industry sector). It has been documented in many European project deliverables as well as in international conference papers, and in journal papers.

This dissertation evaluates and elevates the perception of the strategic use of design for airlines, especially a Silent Design airline like Saudia Airlines. Saudia Airlines is an international airline located in the Gulf region in the Middle East. In comparison to some other Gulf state airlines, Saudia Airlines benefits from its large geographical coverage, and is considered to be one of the richest and longest established carriers in the industry. However, the rapid growth during the past few years of other Gulf carriers (e.g. Emirates Airlines, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways) highlights the necessity for improvements to be made by Saudia Airlines so that it can sustain its position in the global market. These three mega Gulf airlines have shown major developments in their strategic use of design in delivering innovative and differentiated design touch points in their customer journeys. The purpose of this research is to ‘create a design management conceptual framework (DMCF) to assist Saudia Airlines in evaluating and elevating the perception of the strategic value of design.’ To date, airlines adopting a Silent Design approach have rarely been addressed in empirical studies. To achieve this, secondary research investigated several topics, mainly the perception of the strategic use of design, the operational use of design and how design was managed based on design management evolution. Furthermore, design outcomes are presented after implementing the strategic use of design, to deliver innovative and differentiated results. Moreover, the case studies of several companies are presented that use design at a strategic level, especially in the airline industry. The primary research investigated key stakeholders’ views (customers, design experts and Saudia Airlines’ employees and design consultants). The findings from these investigations, and emergent key themes and sub-themes created the prototypes that led to the formulation of the DMCF, which is the main contribution of this study. The DMCF was developed and tested with experts in the field. The proposed framework is considered a significant starting point for airlines that want to evaluate and elevate their perception of the strategic use of design. The DMCF addresses the significant results of this study and key points are made, as follows: 1) Four key dimensions are identified: a) organisational mind-set, b) structure and design capabilities, c) design process and communication, and d) customer experience, which could evaluate and elevate the strategic use of design. 2) The Silent Design culture is identified as pertaining to Saudia Airlines in this study. This culture emphasises the moderate ambition of the strategic use of design by using it at an operational level. It also includes an ill-defined structure for managing design and a lack of design capabilities. In addition, it has an unclear design process and ad hoc cross-departmental collaboration. The overall result is that the Silent Design organisations’ customer experiences are characterised by undifferentiated products and services. 3) The Strategic Design culture is identified and addresses the airlines that make good use of design. This culture emphasises the strong ambition of the strategic use of design by using it at a strategic level. It also includes a systematic and clear structure for managing design. It has a clear design process and clear cross-departmental collaboration. The overall result is that Strategic Design organisations maintain their position as innovators and differentiators within the airline industry. 4) Some recommendations are made that target how to bridge the gap between these two cultures, including appointing a design leader within a Silent Design culture airline. This would elevate the airlines’ perceptions of the strategic use of design.

This thesis describes how Innovation Management Consultants (IMCs) can promote changes in R&D/marketing relationships. The research was motivated by the scarce number of studies about the impact of IMCs on organisational relationships in general, and particularly on R&D and marketing relationships. This thesis contributes to knowledge in four strands of literature: technology management, organisational change, management consulting and conflict studies. Firstly, its main contribution is to technology management literature. Empirical evidence indicates that IMCs can modify the relationship between R&D and marketing functions, even though they are not hired explicitly for that purpose. Nonetheless, the main impact on the relationship is perceived at the personal level and it is dependent on the format of the intervention process. Additionally, the changes in the R&D/marketing relationship and its continuity seem to be conditional upon contextual factors such as specific company and consultant characteristics, as well as the nature of the consultant-client relationship. Secondly, this study has added to scholarly knowledge in organisational change by providing empirical evidence that IMCs advocate for the same dynamics used by Organisational Development (OD) consultants. The results highlight the importance of a facilitative-participative approach and organisational learning to generate change. The results suggest that certain OD theories such as sociotechnical systems theories and Lewin’s model can be used to explain the effect of IMCs on intra-organisational relationships. Thirdly, this research also augments knowledge about IMCs in management consulting literature because it provides evidence about the activities conducted by IMCs and their unexpected effects within client organisations. This addresses a gap identified in the literature, since the contributions of this type of Management Consultant (MC) have not been significantly investigated and the focus of previous studies has been on expected results. Finally, this research contributes to the area of conflict studies, particularly to the intersection between R&D/marketing integration and conflict, since it provides certain evidence about some IMCs’ mediation techniques that can be used to diminish conflict between different areas within an organisation. The research followed an inductive approach to understanding the changes that IMCs can promote in R&D/marketing relationships in large firms. The research is based on empirical evidence gathered through twelve case studies, feedback interviews and a small-scale survey. A framework describing the possible changes that IMCs can promote in the R&D/Marketing relationship was then built from grounded, within-case, and cross-case analysis. Lastly, in order to verify the observations obtained during the case studies, as well as the pertinence of the proposed framework, a set of eight feedback interviews with company participants and IMCs were carried out, as well as a small-scale survey. The results of these verification activities indicate that the proposed framework is reasonably complete and its elements are coherent.

No description available.

The thesis focuses on the topic of innovation management in the large companies and presents specific analysis of Georg Fischer Piping Systems

The thesis deals with the management of Czech companies operating in the market areas where frequent innovations are crucial for long term success. The theoretical part of the thesis focuses on the techniques available for strategic management and the management of innovations. On this theoretical background the research part is based. It contains the results of own survey carried out in the selected Czech companies, presented in the context of strategic management and innovation management theory. The method of structured interview with owners or top management members was chosen for research. The interview deals mostly with the areas of strategic management and the management of innovations. The information derived from the structured interview is combined with the economic results of company. Consequently, the relations between techniques and results are found. The thesis also contains the list of five recommendations that, based on research, can be useful for managers.

Middle managers operate in an environment close to activities of their firm and in interaction with this environment identify opportunities, challenges, and subsequently generate innovation alternatives. While doing so they - among other - utilize also weak ties within their social network, which permeate internal and external environment of the firm and enable entry of new and divergent information in the innovation process. Middle managers communicate selected information to senior management levels, and the communication exchange between the middle and top management facilitates compliance with the firms innovation strategy, ensures resources as well as high level support for the implementation of innovation; middle managements information inputs at the same time influence senior management in defining the firms innovation strategy. In contact with ordinary employees (and lower levels of management), middle management compensates for differences between strategy and current activities of the firm, promotes innovation and overcomes resistance. To ensure support for innovation within the organization, middle managers draw, inter alia, on their internal networks of strong ties, including their informal components. Middle management acts as a communication bridge, which helps to balance the tensions originating from the differences between environments of the senior management and employees. From this perspective, the communication interfaces between the different levels of management, or the companys hierarchy, seem to play a critical role; my research at the same time indicates there are significant differences in perception between middle and senior management of intracompany processes enabling innovation.