The purpose of this study was to explore innovativeness and entrepreneurial tendencies among different national cultures. A survey instrument was administered on a sample of 731 business students from several countries in Asian, Baltic, USA, Nordic and Middle, South and East European countries. Respondents completed the questionnaire which focused on innovativeness and proactiveness as well as entrepreneurial risk-taking, growth and intention to start a business. Results indicated various statistically significant differences between cultures. The paper highlights country specific strategies for enhancing entrepreneurship.
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Technological developments go fast and are interrelated and multi-interpretable. As consumer needs change, the technological possibilities to meet those needs are constantly evolving and new technology providers introduce new disruptive business models. This makes it difficult to predict what the world of tomorrow will look like for an organization and that makes the risks for organizations substantial. In this context, it is difficult for organizations to determine what constitutes a good strategy to adopt digital developments. This paper describes a first step of a study with the objective to design a method for organizations to formulate a future-proof strategy in a rapidly changing, complex and ambiguous context. More specifically, this paper describes the results of a sequence of three focus groups that were held with a group of eight experts, with extensive experience as members of the decision making unit in organizations. The objectives of these sessions were to determine possible solutions for the outlined challenge in order to provide direction for continuation and scoping of the following research phases.
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This paper studies the productive role of innovation in organisations. Using the post-structuralist insight that innovation is an open concept that can become performative, we shift the emphasis from analysing innovations themselves to analysing how the concept of innovation affects the organisational practices through which it acquires meaning. Deploying this framework, we studied the development of an innovation unit within TUI, a corporate tour operator. We found that actors interpreted innovation in different ways and that initially the innovation unit was considered a failure. The subsequent dramatisation of this failure resulted in a new version of this innovation unit that strengthened established actors and institutions within the organisation. Our study shows how the use of the concept of innovation in an organisation can both stimulate and hamper its innovativeness. Addressing this paradox requires sensitivity to the concept's productive role and evaluations of innovation that look beyond accomplished results.
Manual labour is an important cornerstone in manufacturing and considering human factors and ergonomics is a crucial field of action from both social and economic perspective. Diverse approaches are available in research and practice, ranging from guidelines, ergonomic assessment sheets over to digitally supported workplace design or hardware oriented support technologies like exoskeletons. However, in the end those technologies, methods and tools put the working task in focus and just aim to make manufacturing “less bad” with reducing ergonomic loads as much as possible. The proposed project “Human Centered Smart Factories: design for wellbeing for future manufacturing” wants to overcome this conventional paradigm and considers a more proactive and future oriented perspective. The underlying vision of the project is a workplace design for wellbeing that makes labor intensive manufacturing not just less bad but aims to provide positive contributions to physiological and mental health of workers. This shall be achieved through a human centered technology approach and utilizing advanced opportunities of smart industry technologies and methods within a cyber physical system setup. Finally, the goal is to develop smart, shape-changing workstations that self-adapt to the unique and personal, physical and cognitive needs of a worker. The workstations are responsive, they interact in real time, and promote dynamic activities and varying physical exertion through understanding the context of work. Consequently, the project follows a clear interdisciplinary approach and brings together disciplines like production engineering, human interaction design, creative design techniques and social impact assessment. Developments take place in an industrial scale test bed at the University of Twente but also within an industrial manufacturing factory. Through the human centered design of adaptive workplaces, the project contributes to a more inclusive and healthier society. This has also positive effects from both national (e.g. relieve of health system) as well as individual company perspective (e.g. less costs due to worker illness, higher motivation and productivity). Even more, the proposal offers new business opportunities through selling products and/or services related to the developed approach. To tap those potentials, an appropriate utilization of the results is a key concern . The involved manufacturing company van Raam will be the prototypical implementation partner and serve as critical proof of concept partner. Given their openness, connections and broad range of processes they are also an ideal role model for further manufacturing companies. ErgoS and Ergo Design are involved as methodological/technological partners that deal with industrial engineering and ergonomic design of workplace on a daily base. Thus, they are crucial to critically reflect wider applicability and innovativeness of the developed solutions. Both companies also serve as multiplicator while utilizing promising technologies and methods in their work. Universities and universities of applied sciences utilize results through scientific publications and as base for further research. They also ensure the transfer to education as an important leverage to inspire and train future engineers towards wellbeing design of workplaces.
