(Online) CIRPe 2020 – 8th CIRP Global Web Conference – Flexible Mass Customisation: A Maturity Model for Rapid Diffusion of Innovation in High Value Manufacturing

Dear all, below please find the abstract submitted for this online conference (see https://iiw.kuleuven.be/events/cirpe2020 for more details). Participating ENTOV-HVM members at the moment are Oliver Schwabe, Pinar Bilge, Andreas Hoessler, John Erkoyuncu, Lynne Schneider, Brian Donnellan, Piero Formica, Franz Dietrich, and Essam Shehab. If you are still interested in joining please let me know - we are especially interested in more case studies. We should be receiving notification about abstract acceptance by end of April and the paper is due middle of June. The online conference is October 14-16 2020 in a pure online format.

Abstract "This paper applies a research-based maturity model for forecasting the speed of innovation diffusion in high value manufacturing from ideation to market saturation. The intent is to identify those “game changing” variables which enable the disruptively fast diffusion of innovations that significantly reduces financial uncertainty and minimizes the time to value creation. The model is applied to multiple case studies related to the repurposing and customization of existing mass manufacturing infrastructures and processes to meet novel requirements under differing conditions of urgency. Exemplary case studies include the manufacturing of intensive care ventilators in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, performing urgent design/manufacturing engineering changes for critical aerospace parts triggered by major quality alerts and introducing new manufacturing technologies for performance improvement as part of business as usual activities in automobile manufacturing.

The authors apply a field-research based generic diffusion of innovation model derived from living systems theory with a special emphasis on determining not only the relevance of “known-known” success factors for rapid innovation diffusion, but also on identifying “unknown-unknown” potential game changers enabling the required changes at pace. The model enables rapid forecasting and performance improvement planning of innovation diffusion from ideation to market saturation within the high value manufacturing context.

Key findings are that the speed of innovation diffusion is primarily driven by the population of all roles in the generic diffusion of innovation system with self-motivated, highly competent and collaborative individuals, sharing a very high sense of urgency and immediacy, aggregating as a high performance tribe in a context where funding, resource and policy constraints are sufficiently lifted early in the life-cycle.

Further research is suggested into the role of digitization and automation through artificial intelligence approaches for reducing performance dependency related to urgency, immediacy, funding, resourcing and policy." 

P.S. If you are interested in learning more please visit us at www.innovation-web.eu, our LinkedIn Group at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8779542/, our blog at https://www.innovation-web.eu/entov-hvm-blog, our Researchgate project page at https://www.researchgate.net/project/Open-European-Network-for-Enterprise-Innovation-in-High-Value-Manufacturing-ENTOV-HVM, our Sourceforge page at https://sourceforge.net/projects/entov-hvm/  and our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/2014779865300180/. You can also follow us via Twitter: @owschwabe (#innovationweb) and the LinkedIn Group page https://www.linkedin.com/company/entov.

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