Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 60-62). / The lean startup methodology has been successfully applied to product development at startup companies, however many of its principles may also be of benefit to established firms. The purpose of this research was to explore the benefits of the lean startup methodology in established organizations. An electronic survey was administered to product managers and engineers at 44 established companies from diverse industries as well as posted on relevant online community groups. Follow-up up interviews were conducted with select respondents for further in-depth analysis. A total of 44 individuals completed the survey and 5 follow-up interviews were conducted. Overall, 11 respondents (25%) reported use of the lean startup methodology at established firms. Success with the methodology was reported in 6 cases. A high proportion of respondents (66%) were not familiar with the method; however, did report use of specific principles aligned with the lean startup method. Results also suggested that use of the methodology was more frequent in environments with high uncertainty and in companies less than 20 years old. Interview results corroborated survey findings and highlighted barriers to implementation. The findings of this work suggest that the lean startup methodology may provide benefit to established firms, however the application of this method in this context is in its infancy. Implications for best practice and directions for future research are also discussed. / by Thomas J. A. Casselman. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis (S.M. in Engineering and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-86). / Over the past several years, the world has been inundated with stories which, when connected, describe an informal and disorganized race by many nations to establish a leadership position in capturing the economic rewards from the pressing need to clean up the worldwide energy supply. At the forefront of this race, is the competition to become the largest supplier of solar energy generation products and services. Many governments around the world are actively incentivizing and creating policy with the hope of constructing a competitive advantage within the solar industry. This thesis aims to provide the decision maker with a novel, objective, and cross-disciplinary perspective on the solar innovation system in the United States. The intention of this thesis is to encourage new ways of thinking about the solar innovation system and to inspire new approaches to effectively support its growth. This thesis presents recommendations to the decision maker at the Department of Energy (DOE) grounded in the underlying dynamics of solar innovation and the DOE's capacity to act. This thesis found that the driving force behind the evolution of solar innovation is a special type of firm which tends to start as an informal group or tribe within a professional environment. The special type firm, the solar innovation leading enterprise, is characterized by performing an in-depth analysis of the evolution of the solar industry in the U.S. over the past 20 years. The solar innovation leading enterprise is a type of firm that has demonstrated the ability to create a disproportionate amount of value for the solar innovation system. Not only has the solar innovation leading enterprise generated value, but it has spilled over enough value to incentivize the building of a broader set of regional capabilities which can be exported to the rest of the world. This thesis presents the ideal characteristics of the solar innovation leading enterprise and the dynamics which lead to its formation, growth, evolution, and sometimes to its creative destruction. The intricacies of how the solar innovation leading enterprise is born, how it evolves, what it requires to grow, and its dynamic relationship with the solar innovation cluster are presented and were derived by examining over 100 case studies in the solar industry. The current state of the competitive advantage of the U.S. is shown by presenting the status of the emerging and established regional solar innovation capabilities. Finally, a framework is constructed to guide the decision maker's actions. It presents the decision maker with ways to build the future competitive advantage of a nation now. The framework has its foundation in the underlying dynamics of solar innovation and characteristics of the solar innovation leading enterprise. / by Donny Holaschutz. / S.M.in Engineering and Management

Thesis (S.M. in Engineering and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, System Design and Management Program, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 60-63). / This thesis is a study on the adoption of cloud computing in healthcare information technology industry. It provides a guideline for people who are trying to bring cloud computing into healthcare information systems through the use of a framework of tools and processes to overcome both technical and business challenges. / by Haiying Ren. / S.M.in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, System Design and Management Program, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 161-164). / The current shift from centralized energy generation to a more distributed model has opened a number of choices for homeowners to provide their own power. While there are a number of systems to purchase, there are no tools to help the homeowner determine which system they should select. The research investigates how an Epoch-Era Analysis formulation can be used to select the appropriate distributed generation system for the homeowner. Ten different distributed generation systems were successfully analyzed and resulted in the average homeowner selecting the solar photovoltaic system. Additionally, the research investigated how using an "average" homeowner compared to an individual homeowner might result in a different distributed generation selection. Two randomly selected homeowners were analyzed and there were noticeable differences with the average homeowner results, including one of the homeowners selecting the geothermal system instead. Suggestions for how the research can be expanded - including individual homeowner parameterization, distributed generation systems inclusion, and epoch/era expansion - are covered at the end. / by Alexander L. Piña. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, February 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "December 2013." / Includes bibliographical references (page 75). / Keeping up with the Joneses, in an Information Technology (IT) sense, is not a feel good activity, it's a necessity to remain competitive. Building and maintaining a relevant, reliable, and scalable IT service infrastructures, without crushing the bottom line, is a necessary undertaking to avoid obsolescence in the marketplace. This is particularly true for very large scale IT Service and "Cloud" providers. At the very top of many CIO's wish list is to obtain, or create, an effective and efficient IT Process Automation (ITPA) framework. Use of ITPA or Run Book automation is a requirement to efficiently manage increasingly massive pools of systems and services under any particular IT Service Provider's management domain. A successful process workflow, run book, automation, and orchestration framework implementation requires a high degree of flexibility and scalability to be successful. It also requires an intuitive command and control structure to manage today's massive scale deployments and their increasingly demanding customers and service level agreements. This paper explores a new applications of a "publish-subscribe" messaging paradigm and how it can be leveraged to construct a core ITPA framework. This ITPA framework will scale to match the various needs of very large IT service infrastructures. The overarching intent of the paper is to discuss this ITPA framework, at a level of detail sufficient enough to provide a well-trained IT practitioner the ability to construct it themselves within their organization. This paper is however abstract enough to give the practitioner a high degree of choice with regards to the specific technologies and implementation details that must ultimately be tailored to their organization's specific needs and requirements. / by Scott E. Albrecht. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, System Design and Management Program, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 102-106). / Stress, both individual and organizational, appears to be an increasing problem in any society, and more so in organizations. It already is taking a significant toll on corporate and national levels. Slow recovering economy and pressures on bottom lines, especially for financially constrained organizations, further emphasize the problem and call for new solutions. This paper explores two aspects of stress - individual and organizational. Our goal was to provide a systems dynamic framework that organizations, as well as individuals, can use to improve the understanding of the physiological and psychological stress loads, as well as understand their relationship to organizational key performance indicators. Like many natural systems, human body is the ultimate limited system. The main benefit of the proposed framework will be the ability to monitor cumulative variables of the functional capacity of human body to process stressors, and the mental and emotional capacity of employees to carry out their duties. / by Davit Tadevosyan. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis (S.M. in System Design and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 127-129). / The promise of the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) to store, retrieve, and communicate medical information effectively for a caregiver team has remained largely unfulfilled since its advent in the late 1960's. Previous studies have cited that the communication function of the EMR is critical to its successful adoption. Based on Mediated Agent Interaction theory, this study proposes a message-based model of transmission of clinical information in the EMR. This model is implemented on an existing ICU clinical database, MIMIC II, to produce a database of transmission events. Three metrics for information transmission are derived from exploratory and object-attribute analyses: transmission volume, duration, and load (or rate). Also derived is a set of features that includes a patient's clinical conditions (with acuity scores and mortality), caregiver type and distribution, care-unit locations, duration of care, and types of clinical records. This list of features is reduced to a set of explanatory variables using correlation and univariate logistic regression. Bayesian Network (BN) models are constructed to predict levels of the transmission metrics. BN models show high prediction accuracy for measuring various levels of messaging volume and load, but marginal accuracy for messaging duration. Results from these methods suggest that the volume of information transmitted in the ICU for adult patients is primarily through charts entered by nurses and respiratory technicians (RTs). The amount of data recorded by RTs increases for patients with higher acuity scores, but transmission from nurses decreases for these patients. The rate at which information is transmitted in the ICU for adult patients is directly related to the rate at which notes and charts are entered, as well as the care-unit location where the data is recorded. Further study is required to investigate factors influencing the length of time information is transmitted in the ICU. This study's findings are based on data recorded by caregivers as clinical observations. Further study is necessary to corroborate these results with clinical communications data, including evidence of reception of clinical information by caregivers. The model proposed by this study may be used as a basis for future research and to discover other patterns of clinical communications. / by Rajesh Mishra. / S.M.in System Design and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, System Design and Management Program, 2015̆. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 71-72). / Exploring a systems-based view of the energy efficiency roadblocks faced by financiers, builders, owners, and tenants. In 1992 Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, wrote a paper entitled "Energy-Efficient Buildings: Institutional Barriers and Opportunities". In it, he detailed roadblocks to constructing energy efficient commercial buildings- from the fear of lenders to finance the unknown, to developers unmotivated to instill efficiency, to mechanical engineers specifying job-securing (and commission-increasing) safety margins when (over)sizing the apparati- every step of a commercial building's genesis is fraught with status quo and timidity. Now, almost 25 years later, we will take a look at what has changed, what hasn't, and what areas still need incentivizing to get on a sustainable track towards efficiency. We model the systems to exhibit the persistent resistance to changes, the extraordinary pace with which some markets have embraced change, and the feedback mechanisms that can make efficiency both possible and profitable. / by James G. Franklin. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 63-67). / Mexico City is a prime location to start a biodiesel enterprise due to its sizeable availability of waste vegetable oil (WVO) and biodiesel users. WVO is an extremely viable feedstock for producing biodiesel because of the similar functional properties compared to other feedstocks and low cost; collecting it for local reuse has enormous environmental savings potential. Supply chain design is essential for the success for this startup biodiesel enterprise. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze a biodiesel enterprises value chain that uses feedstock as the primary performance area within the value chain. Second, this thesis will focus on optimizing the feedstock supply chain through a vehicle routing problem with time constraints in order to maximize the cost performance of the business. TransCAD transportation planning software was used to solve the vehicle routing problem through different scenarios that included 263 WVO stops positioned randomly and clustered. The results reveal a logistics design model with optimized transportation cost providing insight into operating a successful start up biodiesel enterprise. Potential takeaways of these findings show that clustering is a necessary technique for optimizing transportation cost through managing vehicle fleet size, manpower, and vehicle scheduling. / by Brian P. Hendrix. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis (S.M. in System Design and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-81). / Obsolescence mitigation is an increasingly important aspect of large systems development & maintenance that has often only been considered once obsolescence is imminent. For long lifecycle systems, this has become a major concern as the lifecycles of the components that are encompassed within these systems are often far shorter - up to ten times shorter - than the overall system lifecycle. Many defense systems can be characterized in this manner and therefore require obsolescence mitigation approaches to ensure the continuing ability for the system to perform and evolve. Current system-level obsolescence mitigation practices make recommendations for designing new systems to slow the onset of obsolescence and make the system more flexible when change for obsolescence is required. However, currently fielded systems were often not designed with this in mind. Other obsolescence mitigation techniques focus only on the approach to mitigating component-level obsolescence locally without examining the impact of the change on the system as a whole. This thesis combines the recommended approaches for obsolescence mitigation, the experience and lessons learned for obsolescence mitigation on a real-world case study system gained from interviews with key subject matter experts, along with systems engineering techniques for dealing with engineering change in systems to develop a robust systems engineering and management approach for obsolescence in large complex systems. The thesis provides the reader with a flow chart and a clustered DSM of the tasks along with a checklist that could be used with this obsolescence engineering and management approach. / by Jaime E. Devereaux. / S.M.in System Design and Management