Peer feedback is increasingly being used as an important part of higher education, as it has a potential to contribute to development of professional skills such as giving and receiving feedback while having the benefit of not overstretching the teacher resources. In this paper we share our experiences of working with peer feedback in a course on organisation and leadership with approximately 170 students given during the first year of a CDIO-based engineering program. We present and discuss the course design and how peer feedback was organized as well as the experiences of both teachers and students of this course. We observe that working with peer feedback has helped our students in achieving several important outcomes, for example increased learning within the subject, documented development of own writing and assessment skills, and increased awareness of different perspectives on the same topic. However, we also identify problematic aspects of working with peer feedback, such as a large variation in the quality of provided feedback, perceived difficulties when students are asked to provide non-anonymous feedback to their peers, and students’ doubts whether peers can provide as “correct” feedback as the teacher would have been able to give. We discuss the benefits and downsides of peer feedback within the framework of CDIO-based engineering education and conclude by recommending that feedback-related skills should be trained and developed throughout educational programs in a gradual and integrated way.

Hur kan det komma sig att idéer från japansk bilindustri får en så stor spridning i Norden inom så vitt skilda verksamheter som sjukvård, administration och gruvindustri? Ett svar som ges i denna bok är att idéerna har anpassats till västerländska samhällen genom begreppet lean produktion som lanserades vid 1990-talets början. Efter millennieskiftet kom en ny våg av lean, med olika tolkningar av begreppet och med spridning till allt fler verksamheter

Bokens syfte är att ge kunskap och inspiration åt chefer, ledare och medarbetare med intresse för kreativitet och innovation. Den baseras på forskning och tar upp exempel hämtade från många av Sveriges ledande företag. Avsikten är att belysa hur organisatoriska förhållanden påverkar förutsättningarna för kreativitet och innovation samt att ge uppslag till hur företags innovationsförmåga kan utvecklas.

This study examines prerequisites for developing ideas in a product development organisation. To encourage new ideas, the organisation used a suggestion system. The study shows that support for employee initiatives varied depending on the type of initiative: proactive or reactive. Employees with reactive initiatives (ideas motivated by quality, customer, or user problems) had strong support from managers, colleagues, patent group employees, and a large international customer. Employees with proactive initiatives - ideas not directly responding to a specific demand - found it risky to offer their suggestions, as they feared their ideas might be stolen. In addition, these employees experienced difficulties to find trustful people and frustration because little feedback was provided after they shared their ideas. The study shows that proactive initiatives are vulnerable and the employees who provide these types of initiative need a trusting and supportive work milieu.

This study examines the role of creativity in an efficient product development organisation. Specifically, this study examines how engineers cope with these demands of being simultaneously creative and efficient. The engineers described the demands in different ways; “extremely lean organization”, “not enough time for development”, and “pressed time schedule”. The answers the engineers provided also describe how difficult it was to be simultaneously creative and efficient. The engineers had either the intention to be or not to be creative when it came to efficient product development; that is, they either (1) confronted and opposed high demands or (2) adapted and worked more than they could handle or (3) avoided being creative and focused on efficiency.

This study shows that the engineers themselves were forced to set the limit when unreasonable demands arose. The first group stressed the importance of resisting creative work when the demands of work were too high. The strategy was to discuss with the managers why it was impossible to be both creative and efficient. The second group adapted to the demand of being simultaneously creative and efficient, but often took more work than they could handle. The fear of saying “no” to a supervisor’s demands forced creativity forward, but this was a dangerous balancing act as this could result in demands beyond worker’s time constraints. For this group, this choice could be a health risk. The third group avoided being creative and concentrated only on being efficient when the pressure of both efficiency and creativity was perceived as being too much. This group often avoided presenting a “good” idea because then they would be responsible for implementing the new idea. This meant they chose a “secure solution” (even if the “solution” was incomplete) rather than taking a risk on a more innovative solution. The work organization needs to support the demand of being simultaneously creative and efficient.

Although many factors have been found to facilitate creativity in product development, the evidence of these studies lacks explanations of the mechanisms enhancing or impeding creativity. Building upon the model of Van de Ven and Poole (1995), a framework is formulated for understanding the motors of creativity in product development. Four motors for driving creativity are proposed: creativity as an evolutionary process, life cycle process, confrontation between different groups or individuals or within the context of a purposeful individual or team. A multiple-case study of three Swedish manufacturers explores the motors further and complements the framework with drivers of and counterforces to the four motors, for example, the existence of challenging managers and the perceived inappropriateness of certain formal processes for creative work. Although creativity is the result of the four motors operating simultaneously, each of the four motors provide different conditions for radical and incremental innovation.

By focusing on individual initiatives, creativity in innovation research can improve. This article examines how to understand initiatives that encourage creativity and innovation (implemented creativity) by further developing an existing theoretical framework on change. After conducting a literature review, the authors categorized the literature into proactive and reactive initatives. Initatives found for creativity were changing, improving and influencing the company´s life-cycle with disciplined creativity (proactive) or responding to the life-cycle (reactive). Analyse, listen, monitor, and respond (reactive evolutionary) or change and influence users and markets (proactive evolutionary) or change and influence users and markets (proactive evolutionary). React, respond and be inspired by a goal/problem determined by outside forces (reactive teleological) or find a self-starting goal/problem (proactive). Create and interact with networks (proactive dynamic) or react and respond to the socio-political trends (reactive dynamic) The article ends with a first attempt to create a tool for diagnosing initiatives for creativity and innovation.

Creativity is an important characteristic of engineering design and one can learn much about creative methods for solving design problems in the literature. In reality, however, the spontaneous creativity of engineers also leads to new innovative ideas that are not directly applicable in current projects. Therefore, it is important that companies have the ability to extract and use these ideas to ensure long-term innovativeness. A suggestion system, the most classic of which is the suggestion box, is an approved general way that can enable this transfer of employee creativity; however, the literature provides little information about the applicability of suggestion systems in organizations for engineering design. This paper investigates the applicability and potential of suggestion systems to enable the critical transfer of creativity from engineering designers to the company. This research, performed as a case study, shows that a suggestion system, along with strong leadership, can help transfer creativity of the engineers to future products.

In this paper we aim to identify major obstacles for creativity in organizations characterized by a high focus on product development efficiency. The way these obstacles are perceived by the different individuals involved in product development is investigated. Different perceptions are compared and the contradictory views on creativity obstacles in product development are discussed. From our study, nine creativity obstacles relevant for organizations with a strong focus on efficiency emerge. These barriers were mainly related to the professional environment, e.g. “short-term efficiency focus” can be related to time constraints, while “unclear innovation strategy” concerns a lack of goals. Also barriers related to the environment emerged, i.e. “no forum for capturing ideas” exists. Self-imposed barriers, like the lack of interest for innovation, did not emerge in this study. Our case company seems to have problems in finding structures for balancing the demands on product development efficiency and creativity.

  The aim with this study is to get a better understanding of creativity initiatives in efficient product development. The empirical base consists of a field study at a mechanical company in Sweden influenced by -lean product development thinking-. Ten interviews (all men) with engineers, project leaders and product development managers were conducted as a first step with a focus on how creativity was initiated and in what situations. As a second step, to explore the various sources of creativity more in-depth, five established and rather successful innovations were selected and studied. The answers were analysed and categorized by using a model inspired by Van de Ven and Poole-s four-field model. The paper shows that creative ideas may origin from a variety of sources. For companies it is necessary to be aware of this variety in order to be able to adjust working methods in product development accordingly in order to encourage innovation in the right way. 

Initiating and implementing new technologies in traditional mechanical products may be important to strategic decision-making with far-reaching consequences for companies. New technology demands new competence. The new competence can come from outside or within the company. What are the differences between an initiative coming from outside or within the company? In this study, two Swedish companies that initiated new technology in their traditional mechanical products have been chosen for scrutiny. The initiative for the new technology came in the -outside-initiative- company from a consulting group. In the -within-initiative- company, the initiative came from engineers at the company. This article compares the attributes of an agile organization with these two companies.

Cooperation is needed in product development of integrated products. Collaboration implies both cooperation and competition and in most cases the situation can be described as something in between pure cooperation and pure competition, also known as co-opetition. This paper is dealing with product development under co-opetition. The aim is to get a better understanding of the design engineers- challenges. A literature overview concerning cooperation, co-opetition and competition have been conducted. The literature categorized according to the researchers unit of analysis; individual, company and macro level. The result shows that the different situations confront the design engineers with completely different questions.

The design of a new product is a result of the competence resource available to the company. Developing the competence resources is an organizational learning process going from the individual through the group level to the organization. If the competence resource reacts relatively slowly to meet requests in the demand from the company customers for changed knowledge in its products, it has a high inertia. Inertia comes from an unwillingness to learn new competences and is detrimental to the operative flexibility of the company. Managing the company for lowest possible inertia when dealing with a change in the product design requires managerial actions at all levels. Realizing the need for a strategic change in the competence resource, the management will take actions to start a learning process. By informing all levels about their vision for the change and by creating the enabling conditions for the learning process, they can decrease inertia. Starting a learning process requires management to provide concurrent information of different forms to suit each of the three systems levels. Each individual must be convinced of the reason for change of competence, and how it can be learned and composed to the desired product. This requires a good information structure and an existing culture of common terms and values.

Development processes in which software is integrated in hardware products are explored with the aim of finding obstacles to the development process and hypothesizing how they can be dealt with. Empirical data are based on case studies in nine manufacturing companies chosen to have a varied amount of software in their products and experience of technology integration. Results indicate that obstacles in experienced companies concern processes, structures and resources but few culture-related issues. In companies with short experience of software integration in hardware development, cultural aspects were important. Where new technology played a strategic role in the product function, organizational issues such as structures, processes and cultural differences formed obstacles. Where technology only had a supporting role, resource-related obstacles such as lack of competencies were more important. Managerial measures tended to be partly related to the different types of obstacles, partly to the strategic situation of the company.

Initiating and implementing new technologies in traditional mechanical products may be important to strategic decision-making with far reaching consequences for companies. New technology demands new competence. The new competence can come from outside or within the company. What are the differences between an initiative coming outside or within the company? In this study, two Swedish companies that initiated new technology in their traditional mechanical products have been chosen. The initiative to the new technology came in the -outside-initiative- company from a consulting group. In the -within-initiative- company the initiative came from engineers at the company. This paper compares the attributes of an agile organization in these two companies.

Cooperation is needed in research and development of new and complex products and processes. The other side of cooperation is competition. In most cases the situation can be described as something in between pure cooperation and pure competition also known as co-opetition The aim with this research is to develop a better understanding of the dynamic of cooperation and competition in product realisation, both on individual, company and macro-level (companies, universities and governments). In empirical research the authors of this article found unobtrusive information about co-opetition in the product realisation process. A literature review has been conducted and different databases have been used to understand co-opetition on different levels - individual, company and macro level. Finally empirical findings concerning cooperation-competition has been reinterpreted. The conclusion from the empirical studies and literature review is that all levels (individual, company and macro level) are important to take into consideration when managing and developing new technology and processes. By better understanding of different forms of collaboration-competition situation at these levels, in the product realisation process, management have the ability to change harmful collaboration-competition situations into more healthy situations and the products reach faster to market.

Integration of new technology in small and medium sized firms- products put certain demands on forms of organization. External consultants are supposed to be important for the creation of integrated products in this type of companies. This paper reports on an explorative study of the importance of different roles of external consultants and what kind of value is created. Along with traditional roles of consultants this study identifies the initiative taker and contact procurer roles as important to provide economic value on an industry level. Bridging small and medium sized companies with the software consultants and academia is not a straightforward work since different cultures exists.

New work organization and new computer-based tools can save costs and improve quality. A fact that often is not acknowledged is that new work organization and new computer-based tools take resources from the organization.

Three empirical studies were performed in production, concerning changed work organization and managerial innovation. The aim of the companies concerned was that most employees in each studied department should be able to work more flexibly, and thereby manage most work tasks and achieve better quality. Three other studies focused on the application of new computer-based tools to product-development work, i.e. on technological innovation. The computer-based tools (for simulation) were used as a test bed for new ideas and trouble-shooting to obtain improved quality and shorter lead times. The methods employed were interviews, group discussions, questionnaires, workcontent matrices, observations, statistical quality control, and quality-assessment tests. The studies showed that the change effected was not as extensive as management had intended. Inertia was found to have an important role to play in the change process. More specifically, individuals were unwilling to learn new tasks because of the pay system, barriers between departments, the work environment, status of tasks, and the initiation and implementation processes. Information about forthcoming redundancies influenced willingness to rotate tasks and learn new ones. Roles and domains of computer-based tools and participation are other contextual variables that must be discussed in relation to change. The studies also show the importance of integrating technology, organization and human aspects in the course of change.

Theoretically, the thesis discusses conceptions of resistance, inertia and restraining forces, and analyzes different theoretical models that integrate technology, organization and human aspects. Some of the subject areas touched upon are industrial and organizational psychology, ecological psychology, sociotechnology, and participatory ergonomics.

The thesis shows that contextual aspects influence change/innovation, and the will of the individual to learn new tasks. Contextual aspects acquire new opinions on usability. The thesis also shows that the reasons why changes fail in companies may include difficulties in integrating technology, organization and human aspects. Treating technology, organization and human aspects as interwoven is a complex task theoretically, and is also highly relevant to research design.