Collaborative Product Development Research Articles

Making co-creation operational: A RECONECT seven-steps-pathway and practical guide for co-creating nature-based solutions

Co-creation as a practice of collaborative product or service development is not a novel concept, however its application in the field of nature-based solutions (NBS) requires a certain level of knowledge, expertise and capacity building to ensure a shared understanding and collaborative dialogue. NBS are defined as cost-effective and ecosystem-based solutions to solving sustainability challenges and climate-change pressures through embedding a more citizen-oriented engagement within its implementation. Although some co-creation principles and guidelines are scientifically well elaborated, only a few of them was put into practice. Thus there is still a need for making them clearer and more feasible to a broad range of stakeholders from the non-scientific community. This problem is mostly caused by the lack of easy-to use framework / strategy for organizing a co-creation and selecting the appropriate co-creation activity for the certain purpose of the NBS realization process. It includes making a right decision on what particular tools, how and with what groups of stakeholders can be applied in a certain case and by the availability of particular resources. For this purpose, a stepwise pathway/guide on how participatory approach can be incorporated into the whole process of NBS co-creation was developed within the RECONECT project. The main innovative contribution of this work is to propose the following ready-to-use solutions:•detailed seven-steps-co-creation pathway and practical recommendations for NBS design and implementation;•multidimensional and comprehensive decision-making matrix consisting of 88 tools for selecting the most suitable solution (tool) according to the particular co-creation goal, available resources and capacities;•additional resources to facilitate and operationalise the co-creation process at each stage of NBS development, offered in the form of a Toolbox.

Smart Product Design Ontology Development for Managing Digital Agility

Digital agility is a critical dynamic capability that is becoming increasingly important in the context of collaborative product development processes (PDPs). This paper aims to address the complexity of today's PDPs by considering various quality aspects including safety, environment, and the entire lifecycle, along with diverse dynamic capabilities such as digital agility and circular economy. The authors employed a semantic web methodology and created an ontology-based knowledge model. The proposed ontology uses Design for X techniques, circular economy, digital agility, and the semantic web under the PDP perspective to increase performance and cooperation between designers and the project team. To validate the ontology, measures for domain ontology evaluation have been used. The paper presents a detailed guide for ontology engineering and evaluation for collaborative smart PDP, which incorporates digital agility as a critical dynamic capability. The proposed ontology can help boost PDP performance and increase customer satisfaction.

Information needs and presentation in agile software development

Agile software companies applying the DevOps approach require collaboration and information sharing between practitioners in various roles to produce value. Adopting new development practices affects how practitioners collaborate, requiring companies to form a closer connection between business strategy and software development. However, the types of information management, sales, and development needed to plan, evaluate features, and reconcile their expectations with each other need to be clarified. To support practitioners in collaborating and realizing changes to their practices, we investigated what information is needed and how it should be represented to support different stakeholders in their tasks. Compared to earlier research, we adopted a holistic approach—by including practitioners throughout the development process—to better understand the information needs from a broader viewpoint. We conducted six workshops and 12 semi-structured interviews at three Finnish small and medium-sized enterprises from different software domains. Thematic analysis was used to identify information-related issues and information and visualization needs for daily tasks. Three themes were constructed as the result of our analysis. Visual information representation catalyzes stakeholder discussion, and supporting information exchange between stakeholder groups is vital for efficient collaboration in software product development. Additionally, user-centric data collection practices are needed to understand how software products are used and to support practitioners’ daily information needs. We also found that a passive way of representing information, such as a dashboard that would disturb practitioners only when attention is needed, was preferred for daily information needs. The software engineering community should consider reviewing the information needs of practitioners from a more holistic view to better understand how tooling support can benefit information exchange between stakeholder groups when making product development decisions and how those tools should be built to accommodate different stakeholder views.

An interactive and integrated framework for collaborative product development in cloud manufacturing using STEP standard-based ontology model.

Due to the growing competition of firms in manufacturing industries, the enhancement of the design of new products for quick and collaborative interaction of stakeholders is inevitable. A customer-oriented approach during the enhancing of product design requires the support of various stakeholders' collaboration from their functionality perspectives. Accordingly, manufacturing firms try to increase the product quality through the continuous collaboration and speeding up of the design process. Moreover, new manufacturing paradigms like cloud manufacturing require global and distributed collaboration of stakeholders. One competitive key necessity for firms is the integration of stakeholders in the design and production stages. This article has proposed an interactive and integrated framework for a cloud collaborative manufacturing system. The proposed framework uses the international STEP standard which ensures data integrity in the whole product development processes. The framework enables stakeholders to work collaboratively and interactively in their disciplines, while it also ensures coherency of modifications to avoid conflicts. The proposed model is introduced using an improvisational design method based on the STEP standard to create an interactive platform with a service-oriented approach and supports stakeholders for their own semantics. In addition to examining the needs of an interactive system, the article provides an architecture for implementation of this perspective. A comprehensive case study is designed to show the capabilities of the proposed framework.

NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK BASED ON UNIVERSITYCOMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT: A CASE OF THAILAND OTOP PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT FOR ELDERLY

One Tambon One Product (OTOP), Thailand’s economic development program has been used to support the local economy, create incomes on the grass root for the locals, and be one of the successful engines to drive local and country economies, which create business opportunities for the locals. This research demonstrates how the new OTOP development related to the role and cooperation between different parties, especially the university and the community that owns the OTOP product can be implemented. This research project is one of the University-community engagement projects to study and initiate OTOP product development from the three provinces of Chiang Mai, Lumphun and Lampang. This collaborative product development leads to three new and innovative products of OTOP based on the large survey and focus group of 1,275 elderly consumers. The value creation technique from local culture was employed to innovate the new products. This research developed the framework consisting of the three strategic stages of development. The cross-collaboration team are the main enabler. The OTOP cooperative ecosystem was tested and it found that this ecosystem can reciprocally benefit all the staffs including help configuring the organisation context and its entrepreneurship.

A semantic similarity-based method to support the conversion from EXPRESS to OWL

Abstract Product data sharing is fundamental for collaborative product design and development. Although the STandard for Exchange of Product model data (STEP) enables this by providing a unified data definition and description, it lacks the ability to provide a more semantically enriched product data model. Many researchers suggest converting STEP models to ontology models and propose rules for mapping EXPRESS, the descriptive language of STEP, to Web Ontology Language (OWL). In most research, this mapping is a manual process which is time-consuming and prone to misunderstandings. To support this conversion, this research proposes an automatic method based on natural language processing techniques (NLP). The similarities of language elements in the reference manuals of EXPRESS and OWL have been analyzed in terms of three aspects: heading semantics, text semantics, and heading hierarchy. The paper focusses on translating between language elements, but the same approach has also been applied to the definition of the data models. Two forms of the semantic analysis with NLP are proposed: a Combination of Random Walks (RW) and Global Vectors for Word Representation (GloVe) for heading semantic similarity; and a Decoding-enhanced BERT with disentangled attention (DeBERTa) ensemble model for text semantic similarity. The evaluation shows the feasibility of the proposed method. The results not only cover most language elements mapped by current research, but also identify the mappings of the elements that have not been included. It also indicates the potential to identify the OWL segments for the EXPRESS declarations.

Collaborating product development and maintenance service: quality incentive with inspection and warranty strategies

ABSTRACT Service-oriented manufacturing has been a prevalent trend in integrating product collaborative development with maintenance service, whereas the final products are frequently trapped into severe quality defects lacking appropriate contracting incentives. This paper establishes a tractable framework investigating the alignment of inspection and warranty strategies to manage product quality throughout the R&D, manufacturing and usage processes. Specifically, the manufacturing effort is motivated by a cost-sharing contract provided by the researcher, who performs quality inspection upon receiving the final product. Subsequent maintenance service is predesignated for warranty period coverage that the cost is partially claimed for compensation from the manufacturer. Under both breakdown and preventive maintenance strategies, we elaborate and compare the optimal incentive intensities solving the equilibrium effort decisions and inspection accuracy. The results suggest that both R&D and manufacturing effort levels under preventive maintenance are slightly higher than that under breakdown maintenance scenario, while inspection accuracy contradicts conversely. The breakdown maintenance strategy is associated with a lower proportion of warranty costs borne by the manufacturer. For a sufficient long warranty period, the researcher is better off to conduct preventive maintenance periodically. Our study contributes to providing explicit implications to manage product development quality with adequate inspection and warranty strategies.

An Empirical Investigation of Green Product Design and Development Strategies for Eco Industries Using Kano Model and Fuzzy AHP

Collaboration in green product design and development is becoming more significant to ensure a brighter future for eco industries, and research into such innovation has increased in recent years. So, it has been emphasized by practitioners that green thinking should be adopted from the design stage through the development stage and into the disposal stage of a product. However, it is challenging to identify the severity of strategies that mainly hampers the growth of green product design and development (GPDD). The current research aimed to identify and rank various strategies based on their significant impact on the development of green product design. The study contains three segments: (1) Multiple strategies were identified based on the published literature, project reports, and interactions with academics and industry experts. Then, 22 strategies were selected for GPDD that could be divided into five clusters: cooperation and commitment from top management commitment (TMC), design for environment (DFE), utilization of green technologies (UGT), green external supply chain management (GESCM), and green internal supply chain management (GISCM). (2) The Kano model was used to identify user requirements and satisfaction levels. (3) The priority weight and rank among selected strategies were determined using the fuzzy AHP approach. The results show that the “DFE” ranks highest among the main categories, and “design for disassembly” has been highlighted as a necessary sub-criteria in the emerging eco industries. Various recommendations are suggested to adopt these techniques, which augment the growth of green product design and development for eco industries.

How digital fabrication technologies within digitalized innovation environments lead to participative aid development

PurposeFacilities such as FabLabs and Makerspaces are characterized by the facilities' wide range of digital fabrication technologies as well as facilities' interdisciplinary user base and collaborative problem solving and product development. These possibilities can also hold great potential for people with disabilities who have a specific need for assistive technology. Since there are no established models of such participatory development processes (PDP) within digitalized innovation environments (DIE), this study intends to provide a comprehensive understanding of these processes along with the influencing factors.Design/methodology/approachThrough a cooperation with a Thalidomide Association, various PDPs were accompanied within a DIE and interviews were conducted with 16 stakeholders involved. Hereby, the perspective of thalidomide-affected people (5) as well as the supporting makers (6) and experts (5) were taken into account. Through a subsequent structured analysis, various dimensions as well as relevant influencing factors could be identified.FindingsIn total, 33 paraphrases could be formed in 8 categories and four dimensions concerning the PDPs investigated. In addition, 17 paraphrases on potentials and challenges could be extracted through generalization.Originality/valueDue to findings' holistic approach, the findings form an empirical basis for further research into this still very young research topic and represent a first step toward theory building. By the applicability of the identified influencing factors an important contribution can be made to the supply of aids and the inclusion of people with disabilities.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon 10.1108/JET-01-2022-0013

New Product Development Framework based on University-Community Engagement: Case Study of Thailand OTOP Development for Elderly Consumer

This research project is one of the University-community engagement projects to study and initiate One Tambon One Product (OTOP) development in the three provinces of Chiang Mai, Lumphun and Lampang. This collaborative product development led to three new and innovative products for OTOP. This research defined and selected the elderly consumer groups from three northern provinces of Chiang Mai, Lumphun, Lampang. This study uses a survey and focus group discussion to identify the buying attitude of 1,275 elderly consumers toward the OTOP product. The quantitative analysis and the AHP technique were applied to identify the group of OTOP products selected for development. The potential top products were identified from the surveys. Then the value creation technique from local culture was employed to innovate the new products. This research developed a framework consisting of the three strategic stages of development. The cross-collaboration team are the primary enabler. The OTOP cooperative ecosystem was tested and found that this ecosystem can reciprocally benefit all the staff, including help configuring the organisation’s context and its entrepreneurship.

Black Box Prediction Methods in Sports Medicine Deserve a Red Card for Reckless Practice: A Change of Tactics is Needed to Advance Athlete Care.

There is growing interest in the role of predictive analytics in sport, where such extensive data collection provides an exciting opportunity for the development and utilisation of prediction models for medical and performance purposes. Clinical prediction models have traditionally been developed using regression-based approaches, although newer machine learning methods are becoming increasingly popular. Machine learning models are considered 'black box'. In parallel with the increase in machine learning, there is also an emergence of proprietary prediction models that have been developed by researchers with the aim of becoming commercially available. Consequently, because of the profitable nature of proprietary systems, developers are often reluctant to transparently report (or make freely available) the development and validation of their prediction algorithms; the term 'black box' also applies to these systems. The lack of transparency and unavailability of algorithms to allow implementation by others of 'black box' approaches is concerning as it prevents independent evaluation of model performance, interpretability, utility, and generalisability prior to implementation within a sports medicine and performance environment. Therefore, in this Current Opinion article, we: (1) critically examine the use of black box prediction methodology and discuss its limited applicability in sport, and (2) argue that black box methods may pose a threat to delivery and development of effective athlete care and, instead, highlight why transparency and collaboration in prediction research and product development are essential to improve the integration of prediction models into sports medicine and performance.

Extended reality prototyping for transdisciplinary collaboration in product development

Extended reality prototyping for transdisciplinary collaboration in product development

Improving distributed collaboration at Porsche Engineering Services GmbH through the application of the EDiT Method

To support development teams with their individual challenges of distributed collaboration in product development, the EDiT method is being developed. This paper contributes to the continuous validation of the EDiT method by a field study at the process team of Porsche Engineering Services GmbH to support the successful transfer into practice. The validation is based on validation by application, validation by evaluation of the contribution to success, and validation by comparison of the requirements. The contribution of the EDiT method could be proven by different measurement criteria, e.g. reducing the average number of days to finish a task by a remarkable amount.

Extended reality prototyping for transdisciplinary collaboration in product development

Extended reality prototyping for transdisciplinary collaboration in product development

New Product Development Collaboration within an Innovation Ecosystem: Coopetition, Trust, and Entrepreneurial Orientation

New Product Development Collaboration within an Innovation Ecosystem: Coopetition, Trust, and Entrepreneurial Orientation

The use of MCDM approach to benchmark suppliers' collaboration in new product development for Thai auto-part manufacturers

Effective collaboration of a supplier for new a product development (NPD) is one of the challenging responsibilities for manufacturers and decision-makers in the NPD environment. From a sustainability perspective, the benchmarking of the appropriated suppliers is a difficult task. This study proposes a process to assess the supplier collaboration by using a multi-criteria decision making approach based on fuzzy Delphi, entropy weight and grey relation analysis. The empirical study is applied to Thai auto-part manufacturers. The results include the appropriated evaluation perspectives and criteria; the relative important criterion with the highest important weight and the first ranking with the best collaborative performance score of benchmarked suppliers. As a starting point for valuable benchmarking of the early supplier collaboration in NPD process, this study would help managers to assess the capabilities and attributes of suppliers before selecting. Its benefits are very useful for academic research and practice.

Remote customer interaction in frugal product development: model with customer evaluation

The objective of this paper is to deliver an efficient structured methodology for spatially distributed but collaborative frugal product development to fulfil the requirements of emerging markets. The utilisation of local content, customer feedback, and preferences are respected to enable the customisation of products and attributes in the customer's environment. Virtual customer inspection tool based on augmented reality is developed and presented for remote customer interactions, recording feedback, preferences, and customisations. The developed tool enables the interaction of the customer with the product in digital, semi-finished, and finished form, which is capturing customer experiences, integrates geographical spread, and validates the product in the customer's environment. To achieve this, the tool uses intelligent decision-making with the incorporation of analytic hierarchy process, where satisfaction evaluation of the customer is used to achieve optimal requirements for frugal product development. The developed tool and associated remote virtual customer interactions are demonstrated with use cases.

Co-design: a novel approach to create value-added products in the creative fashion industry

Additional value creation is a critical characteristic of innovative products. Co-design is regarded as an effective approach to creating additional experience value through customer engagement in the product development process. It does not only benefit the comprehension of customer desires but also the inspiration for creating and increasing customer loyalty. However, some barriers may exist in value-creation chains in many creative industries, such as the designer-driven product design, forecast-based marketing, homogeneity of products, long product and development cycles, mass production and so forth. As a typical creation-intensive industry, the fashion industry is focused on in this paper to be surveyed in terms of practices of co-design. This paper has analysed the co-design practices in the fashion industry in terms of market research, design model and manufacturing. Several practitioners who implement co-design strategy in fashion product development have been observed and analysed from the perspective of the value creation chain. The study result demonstrates that customer involvement, co-creating design method, collaborative product development mechanism are the essential aspects of the implementation of co-design in the fashion industry. The significance of this study is not only to offer an effective approach for the fashion industry to survive in increasingly competitive markets but also to point out the developing direction of the relative creative industries. In the conclusion, the paper suggests that further studies related to co-design need to be addressed and would primarily concern themes about the various additional values for innovative products and services and mass customization in creative industries.

THE POSITIVE IMPACT OF AGILE RETROSPECTIVES ON THE COLLABORATION OF DISTRIBUTED DEVELOPMENT TEAMS – A PRACTICAL APPROACH ON THE EXAMPLE OF BOSCH ENGINEERING GMBH

AbstractTo counteract competitive pressure, increasing customer requirements and growing product complexity successful distributed collaboration in product development is vital. Companies have to face new challenges, such as efficiency losses in communication. To overcome these challenges agile working practices, such as agile retrospectives, could be beneficial. The objective of this scientific work is to evaluate the benefit of agile working practices on the example of agile retrospectives, for the improvement of collaboration in distributed development teams. Based on literature analysis, qualitative and quantitative expert interviews following the DRM by Blessing and Chakrabarti, this scientific work shows that agile working practices have a high potential to improve distributed collaboration. To address this potential, several virtual agile retrospectives are developed and conducted within a distributed team at Bosch Engineering GmbH. The evaluation of this approach results in a high potential of agile retrospectives indicating an improvement tendency. Especially iteratively implemented virtual agile retrospectives have a positive impact on successful distributed collaboration.

New Product Development Process Design for Small and Medium Enterprises: A Systematic Literature Review from the Perspective of Open Innovation

New product development (NPD) is essential for large, as well as small and medium, enterprises (SMEs). Despite its importance for the economy, challenges remain in the NPD in SMEs. Product success is related with the NPD process, so it is important for SMEs to be able to design their NPD process. This paper aims to identify SME’s NPD research topics, the characteristics of the NPD process in SMEs, and important aspects to be considered for NPD process design. The literature review is done with the analysis of 99 selected academic articles from Scopus and ScienceDirect. Content analysis, bibliographic analysis, and clustering method (based on Pearson’s correlation coefficient) are used to conduct the identification. Less-formal processes, informal strategic planning, limited resources, need technology support, and lack of capabilities in certain fields are some of the characteristics of SME’s NPD. Collaborative product development, competitive advantage, information and communication technology (ICT), concurrent engineering, quality function deployment, and continuous improvement are important keywords based on previous research in SME’s NPD. Design activities in NPD, collaboration and source of innovation, and process modelling, tools, and techniques appear to be important aspects related with the SME’s NPD process.