| 1. |
- Abu Sa'a, Ehab, et al.
(författare)
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Enabling knowledge sharing in university-cross-industry competence centres
- 2023
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Ingår i: Proceedings of European Academy of Management (EURAM) 2023. - Dublin, Ireland.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- University competence centres (UCCs) are created to enhance university-industry collaboration and knowledge sharing among collaborating partners. This study investigates the organisation of knowledge sharing among firms in UCCs through a qualitative case study of UCCs with or without a focus on research in their activities. Data collection was done through interviews and observations over a period of 24 months. While the findings indicate that both types of UCCs are non-neutral, they also reveal several different characteristics that appear primarily based on a strong tie either to the first (education) or the second (research) mission of academia. Although both types of UCCs act to build a common meaning among participating organisations, the focus on the first or the second mission leads to this meaning is primarily being constructed in the firm-to-firm or university-to-firm interfaces, respectively. Whereas cross-industry knowledge sharing is emphasised by both types of centres, it is thus more strongly emphasised by UCCs without a focus on research as it helps to avoid harmful effects of knowledge spillovers. The focus on the first mission also appears able to sustain the organisation of knowledge ecosystems created by UCCs without a focus on research in a prefigurative form, which is otherwise typically transient. Furthermore, the challenges to sustainability are different, with centres focused on research being pre-occupied with funding issues, while centres not focused on research leveraging on others means to maintain the interest of industry. The findings contribute to innovation management research and practice by refining current understanding of processes and practices of university-industry collaboration, and how they contribute to facilitate (cross-industry) collaboration and knowledge transfer. Given that university-industry collaboration is often promoted in national innovation policies to create value for society as whole, our findings contribute towards enabling organisations, managers as well as governments to take more informed actions when engaging in such collaborations.
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| 2. |
- Asplund, Fredrik, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Boundary spanning at work placements : Challenges to overcome, and ways to learn in preparation for early career engineering
- 2021
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Ingår i: European Journal of Engineering Education. - : Taylor & Francis Group. - 0304-3797 .- 1469-5898.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The transition from engineering student to early career engineer is often difficult as not all skills that constitute effective engineering practice are formally taught. Work placements are suggested as a solution by providing opportunities to learn skills that academia is unable to teach. However, academic requirements for skills such as research proficiency can be overlooked in a work placement environment, since they are often seen as of little value to engineers. Nevertheless, through interviews with master’s students that have conducted their thesis projects at a firm, their experience of boundary spanning to align academic and industrial requirements has been shown to prepare them for an (early) career in engineering by providing opportunities to learn informal professional skills. As the effect is moderated by the motivation of the individual firm for offering work placements, teachers need to consider this motivation when planning and preparing a student for such a work placement.
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| 3. |
- Asplund, Fredrik, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Conflict as software levels diversify : Tactical elimination or strategic transformation of practice?
- 2020
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Ingår i: Safety Science. - Oxford, United Kingdom : Elsevier. - 0925-7535 .- 1879-1042. ; 126
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Communities of Practice create a shared consensus on practice. Standards defining software levels enable firms to diversify practice based on a software component’s contribution to potential failure conditions. When industrial trends increase the importance of lower software levels, there is a risk that the consensus on practice for software engineers used to primarily working at higher levels of assurance is eroded. This study investigates whether this might lead to conflict and – if so – where this conflict will materialize, what the nature of it is and what it implies for safety management.A critical case study was conducted: 33 engineers were interviewed in two rounds. The study identified a disagreement between designers with different roles. Those involved in the day-to-day activities of software development advocated elimination of practice (dropping or doing parts less stringently), while those involved in expert advice and process planning suggested transforming practice (adopting realistic alternatives).This study contributes to practice by showing that this conflict has different implications for firms that do not lead vs those that lead the early adoption of technology. At the majority of firms, safety management might need to support the organisation of informal opinion leaders to avoid vulnerability. At early adopters, crowdsourcing could provide much-needed help to refine the understanding of new practice. Across entire industries, crowdsourcing could also benefit entire engineering standardization processes. The study contributes to theory by showing how less prescriptive standardization in the context of engineering does not automatically shift rulemaking towards allowing engineers to act more autonomously.
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| 4. |
- Asplund, Fredrik, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Engineer-Centred Design Factors and Methodological Approach for Maritime Autonomy Emergency Response Systems
- 2022
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Ingår i: Safety. - Basel, Switzerland : MDPI. - 2313-576X. ; 8:3, s. 54-54
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Commercial deployment of maritime autonomous surface ships (MASSs) is close to becoming a reality. Although MASSs are fully autonomous, the industry will still allow remote operations centre (ROC) operators to intervene if a MASS is facing an emergency the MASS cannot handle by itself. A human-centred design for the associated emergency response systems will require attention to the ROC operator workplace, but also, arguably, to the behaviour-shaping constraints on the engineers building these systems. There is thus a need for an engineer-centred design of engineering organisations, influenced by the current discourse on human factors. To contribute to the discourse, think-aloud protocol interviewing was conducted with well-informed maritime operators to elicit fundamental demands on cognition and collaboration by maritime autonomy emergency response systems. Based on the results, inferences were made regarding both design factors and methodological choices for future, early phase engineering of emergency response systems. Firstly, engineering firms have to improve their informal gathering and sharing of information through gatekeepers and/or organisational liaisons. To avoid a too cautious approach to accountability, this will have to include a closer integration of development and operations. Secondly, associated studies taking the typical approach of exposing relevant operators to new design concepts in scripted scenarios should include significant flexibility and less focus on realism.
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| 5. |
- Asplund, Fredrik, 1977-
(författare)
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Exploratory Testing: Do Contextual Factors Influence Software Fault Identification?
- 2018
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Ingår i: Information and Software Technology. - : Elsevier. - 0950-5849 .- 1873-6025.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Context: Exploratory Testing (ET) is a manual approach to software testing in which learning, test design and test execution occurs simultaneously. Still a developing topic of interest to academia, although as yet insufficiently investigated, most studies focus on the skills and experience of the individual tester. However, contextual factors such as project processes, test scope and organisational boundaries are also likely to affect the approach.Objective: This study explores contextual differences between teams of testers at a MedTec firm developing safety-critical products to ascertain whether contextual factors can influence the outcomes of ET, and what associated implications can be drawn for test management.Method: A development project was studied in two iterations, each consisting of a quantitative phase testing hypotheses concerning when ET would identify faults in comparison to other testing approaches and a qualitative phase involving interviews.Results: Influence on ET is traced to how the scope of tests focus learning on different types of knowledge and imply an asymmetry in the strength and number of information flows to test teams.Conclusions: While test specialisation can be attractive to software development organisations, results suggest changes to processes and organisational structures might be required to maintain test efficiency throughout projects: the responsibility for test cases might need to be rotated late in projects, and asymmetries in information flows might require management to actively strengthen the presence and connections of test teams throughout the firm. However, further research is needed to investigate whether these results also hold for non safety-critical faults.
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| 6. |
- Asplund, Fredrik, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Knowing too much? : On bias due to domain-specific knowledge in internal crowdsourcing for explorative ideas
- 2021
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Ingår i: R&D Management. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 0033-6807 .- 1467-9310.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Internal crowdsourcing utilizes a firm’s employees, of which many have a strong understanding of the domains in which the firm operates, for contributing with, developing and evaluating ideas. On the one hand, these employees can use their domain-specific knowledge to identify the value of what may seem a far-fetched solution to the average employee. On the other hand, previous research has shown that employees typically evaluate ideas in their domains less favorably if they do not align with ongoing exploitation activities. Hence, this study focuses on whether a higher degree of relevant domain-specific knowledge makes employees participating in internal crowdsourcing prefer exploitative solutions when evaluating ideas. An empirical study of an online platform for firm-internal innovation in a multinational engineering company showed that employees who only infrequently participated in internal crowdsourcing mostly contributed to and evaluated ideas within their own domain. Employees who frequently participated also contributed to and evaluated ideas outside their own domains. By statistically analyzing group differences during idea evaluation, we show that employees participating infrequently favor exploitable solutions, whereas employees participating frequently are more uncertain. The former difference is only seen concerning ideas that require domain-specific knowledge to understand, but the latter is observed for all types of ideas. This study makes three substantial contributions. First, employees with domain-specific knowledge, through their preference for exploitative solutions, bias the outcome of internal crowdsourcing when idea evaluation requires domain-specific knowledge. Second, this bias is aggravated by the overall higher level of uncertainty displayed by employees participating frequently in internal crowdsourcing and thereby tend to reach out to other domains. Third, in order to mitigate this, bias management can build engagement in internal crowdsourcing through idea challenges that do not require domain-specific knowledge and consider avoiding employees with a strongly associated domain knowledge for idea evaluation.
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| 7. |
- Asplund, Fredrik, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Problematizing the Service Portfolio of Digital Innovation Hubs
- 2021
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Ingår i: Smart and Sustainable Collaborative Networks 4.0. - Cham : Springer Nature. ; , s. 419-426
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Digital innovation hubs (DIHs) are a strategic means to drive European Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) digital transition. The European Commission has envisioned four main functions characterizing DIHs' service portfolios (“Test before invest”; “Support to find investments”; “Innovation eco-system and networking”; and “Skills and training”). However, DIHs target different functions, e.g. focusing on helping launch novel digital technologies to market, or directing investment opportunities. DIHs are also at different maturity levels, interact with different actors and exist in regions with different conditions for innovation. There might not be an equal need for all four functions, and they might not be equally well served. This study aims to explore and derive implications for the deployment of the four main functions by DIHs. It builds on the activities of DIHs involved in the DIH initiative through several innovation actions, including FED4SAE and HUBCAP.
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| 8. |
- Asplund, Fredrik, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Rapid Integration of CPS Security and Safety
- 2018
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Ingår i: IEEE Embedded Systems Letters. - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 1943-0663.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The security and safety of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) often influence each other. Ensuring that this does not have negative implications might require a large and rigorous effort during the development of CPS. However, early in the lifecycle, quick feedback can be valuable helping security and safety engineers to understand how seemingly trivial design choices in their domain may have unacceptable implications in the other.We propose the Cyber Risk Assessment Framework (CRAF) for this purpose. The CRAF is based on openly available and widely used taxonomies from the safety and security domains, and a unique mapping of where loss of data security may impact aspects of data with safety implications. This paper represents the first time these different elements have been brought together into a single framework with an associated process. Through examples from within our organisations we show how this framework can be put to good use.
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| 9. |
- Asplund, Fredrik, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Reinforcing Learning in an Engineering Master’s Degree Program : The Relevance of Research Training
- 2019
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Ingår i: International journal of engineering education. - 0949-149X. ; 35:2, s. 598-616
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Master students at our institute were graduating without acceptable research proficiency. We intervened by shifting our research training from teaching-centred to student-centred, and from research-related subject content to research-related processes. We performed a mixed methods study aimed to confirm there was improved research proficiency without a negative trade-off for our students’ engineering skills. Results indicated improvements to research proficiency, which our students were able to transfer to engineering-related learning activities to increase their ability to achieve engineering synthesis. This outcome was potentially supported by our courses including several perspectives on scientific knowledge production. This implies that research training, rather than having a negative effect on engineering skills, can be helpful in learning diametrically opposing aspects of thinking required by current engineering. As engineering education evolves towards more cross-disciplinary cooperation, this implies the need to pursue the increased opportunities for students to learn about different perspectives on knowledge production.
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| 10. |
- Asplund, Fredrik, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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The genesis of public-private innovation ecosystems : Bias and challenges
- 2021
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Ingår i: Technological forecasting & social change. - : Elsevier. - 0040-1625 .- 1873-5509. ; 162
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The emergence of technology increasingly depends on innovation ecosystems and frequently involves actors from both industry and academia. However, value creation may experience challenges due to bias formed during public-private innovation ecosystem genesis.This empirical study of bias in a new pan-European public-private initiative provides results regarding innovation ecosystems and the individuals typically active during their genesis: value creation is biased towards the selection of incumbent firms and complement challenges, and participation is biased towards engineers with knowledge of exploitation from multiple domains and researchers with knowledge of exploitation from single domains.This suggests that the implications of the loose coupling emphasised by the innovation ecosystems discourse and the knowledge of the different contexts in which firms capture value are more complex than previously acknowledged. The practical implications are that the ability of public innovation ecosystem leadership to act early on novel technology might be offset by the inability of involved firms to commit to bringing the technology to market and that individuals typically active during public-private innovation ecosystems genesis are not ideal for handling this challenge. In fact, increasingly connected public leadership could smother the innovation ecosystem unless well-connected and multidisciplinary researchers are brought in as brokers.
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