Strategic Technology and Innovation Management Consortium 2015
2015 programme
The Strategic Technology & Innovation Management (STIM) Consortium is a practice-oriented research and networking collaboration between industrial member companies and the Centre for Technology Management.
Download the STIM Consortium flyer here.
Members of the Consortium benefit from:
- Access to a network of firms from a range of industry sectors to share experience through a regular series of meetings and engagement in individual research projects.
- The opportunity to influence the direction of research and development, with the associated early benefits gained through participation in case studies and application pilots.
- Transfer and application of methods developed, enabled by guidance notes and training packages.
A summary of the 2013 and 2014 programme and research portfolio can be found below:
To find out more, and how you can participate in the Consortium, please contact:
Dr Rob Phaal E: rp108@cam.ac.uk
2015 Research project portfolio
The research projects in the 2015 STIM programme portfolio are summarised below.
1. Keeping roadmapping alive – practical approaches for embedding the process
Keeping roadmapping alive is an even greater challenge than starting it up. Recent industrial feedback suggests that a practical approach to 'embedding' roadmapping in an organisation would be useful. This project aims to understand the problems involved more clearly, to develop preliminary guidance and identify priorities for further work.
Contact: Clare Farrukh
2. Scalable toolkit platform
The uptake and utilisation of management tools is a challenge in industry; especially given the need to select, adopt and integrate individual tools into a consolidated toolkit that can be implemented within current organisational processes and systems. This research project is developing a scalable toolkit platform to enable the design and deployment of coherent tool sets in industrial settings. The platform is based on a minimum core set of tools (roadmaps, portfolio matrices, interlinked grids) and the research topics for 2015 are:
- Sense-making – Investigate the application of tools for analysing the data generated from strategy workshops.
- Interlinked grids – Explore the use of interlinked grids (e.g. Hoshin/X-matrix, QFD/HoQ) and their adaptation for specific applications/situations.
Contact: Dr Clive Kerr
3. Visualising portfolios
Portfolio perspectives are fundamental for managers and their common depiction is a basic ‘bubble’ chart. Typically, the execution of such visuals is relatively poor and lacks a robust approach to presentational style and information content. Taking a pragmatic stance that attempts to balance data provision with the needs of users for information comprehension, this research project will continue the process of developing prototypal visual representations for depicting different types and aspects of portfolios. The research topics for 2015 are:
- Platform depictions – Explore approaches for depicting platform-orientated strategic plans and develop appropriate visual representations.
- Pipeline depictions – Develop pipeline depictions (for managed programmes in formalised stage-gated processes).
- Novel depictions – Develop new representations for specific applications/situations.
- Heat maps – Explore approaches for interrogating the content, extracting the insights and presenting the results.
Contact: Dr Clive Kerr
4. Patent informatics to support innovation processes
The project will explore and typologize existing patent data indicators (e.g. patent value, quality) and patent analysis tools (e.g. citation analysis, patent to invention maps). Involving experts (e.g. via interviews, a survey) the projects will explore innovation process related questions that can be answered using the different indicators and tools. A practical guide (framework) with recommendations for suitable patent indicators / tools to effectively support the different gate decisions will result from the project.
Contact: Dr Frank Tietze
5. The development of business models to anticipate disruption
Researchers indicate that when the advent of a new technology causes disruption, it is because firms might not have properly reacted and assimilated the signals of change. On one side, they might have missed out on the weak signals (as they might appear in areas which might seem not related to the business); on the other, they might have just downplayed the implications (as initially the commercial implications of a new technology might seem trivial for large businesses).
Having a way to feel prepared to imminent threats could be a proactive approach to reduce the challenges of assimilating intelligence relative to problems and threatening scenarios.
This project aims to understand whether there are patterns in the way companies reconfigure their current business model in the light of a looming technological disruption.
- How do emerging technologies influence the business model development?
- How do companies reconfigure their value-capture models to face with a disruption?
Practical implications: The results will be used to develop guidelines on how companies could reconfigure their value-capture approach when thinking about a prospective disruption.
Contact: Dr Letizia Mortara
6. ‘Reynolds Number’ for R&D? Loading and scheduling multi-project R&D activities
It is a truism that projects tend to overrun, and R&D projects more so than most. Managers usually assume that the culprit is over-optimistic estimating or a lack of discipline among innovative engineers. These may well be true. But the problem may in part be a misunderstanding of the effects of excessive loading. It is well known that when a job passes from one worker or server to another an element of randomness in scheduling (which is almost inevitable in any innovative project) can lead to queuing and delays at surprisingly low loads. This in turn leads to extra reporting, negotiation and changing of priorities; and in an attempt to rescue the situation engineers may work on several projects at once, which is itself a cause of inefficiency. There may be a critical level of loading (a kind of Reynolds Number) beyond which a certain point adding more work results in reduced output as well as delays.
The purpose of this research is to explore these issues, including the estimating problem, in order to recommend ways both to alleviate them and to determine the optimal level of loading in a particular case.
Contact: Professor Rick Mitchell
7. Serious gaming for STIM training
Serious games are a mechanism for supporting learning in organisations. They can provide educational benefits through the experiences that they provide practitioners, doing so in neutral, risk-free settings away from day-to-day decision-making. In the 2015 STIM programme, the "Acquiring early-stage technology" game that started to be developed during 2014 will be completed, while new serious games in the areas of corporate venturing and design thinking will begin to be developed.
Contact: Dr Simon Ford
8. Value creation and capture – Enrichments and Headstarts
Value creation for companies involved in R&D and service delivery presents many challenges. Differentiating activities that create value from those that do not is one. Quantifying value is another. In addition the challenges become more difficult a wider view of value is adopted; one which includes relative values which are implicit, such as staff retention or competency. This project builds on work completed in 2014 and aims to develop the concepts of Headstarts and Enrichments which may be identifiable in any project.
Contact: Dr Val Lynch
9. Supply chain collaboration
Uncertainty and speed of market place changes are leading companies to take different approaches to new product and process development (NPPD). There is a need to reduce the time to identify, develop and commercialise new technologies to timely meet market demand. Due to the fluid market environment it’s not always possible (or strategically wanted) to invest and have all competencies and capabilities within the firm. Time and risk to market can be reduced through supply chain collaboration.
This project supports PhD research, to identify enablers and barriers STIM (and other) companies have to collaborative developments with supply chain partners. The research continues with a developed framework to be refined and tested, aligning and utilising supply chain technology capabilities through collaborative interactions enabling unique product and process offerings.
Contact: Tanya Edwards
10. Roadmap architecture design
As part of a PhD research project, the aim of this project is to explore the design of roadmap architectures for supporting strategy and innovation. This will be achieved by reviewing the literature and practice of roadmapping, and through interviews with roadmapping practitioners and experts in industry and IfM. The project aims to develop guidance to support the configuration of roadmap structures appropriate to strategic context.
Contact: Yuta Hirose
11. Technology-based project evaluation and valuation
This project is designed to deliver a conceptual framework for technology valuation and evaluation, together with a catalogue of techniques use and their advantages and disadvantages, from large company’s perspective. This project requires a combination of theory, paralleled exploratory interviews and case studies to explore the industrial context of technology valuation and evaluation, understand key dimensions that characterise the challenge, and understand methods used, their strengths and weaknesses.
Contact: Bingging Zhao
12. Portfolio balancing: An analysis of practical methods used in manufacturing-orientated companies
This MET project investigated technology and innovation portfolio balancing practices currently being used in a range of industries. The aims were to identify parameters commonly used for balancing, methods for managing dependences, and for visualising portfolios. A conceptual framework for portfolio selection and balancing was developed.
Contact: Sasha Nagarajah
13. Roadmapping implementation in a research technology organisation
This MET project focused on the assessment of a roadmapping system in place at a large research technology organisation. Current practices were assessed, developing recommendations to support the ongoing development of an integrated system. In addition to a project report to the company, a short general guidance note was produced to share within the STIM consortium.
Contact: Emma Clement
