User-centered approaches are a key concern for firms’ innovation practices, while higher engineering education typically focuses on the technical problem-solving activities. Recently, engineering education has incorporated team assignments for students where they are encouraged to manage open-ended problems. Yet, many students’ conduct appears to be “business as usual” and they do not make an attempt to shift their views. Reasons for this behavior need to be investigated to inform the engineering curricula. The purpose in this paper is to demonstrate the impact of distinct orientations on an open-ended design challenge in order to highlight differences, which have implications for learning and education. This study applies familiar educational psychology concepts to the unfamiliar setting of design education, focusing on user needs and acknowledging students’ orientations as a possible basis for guiding and accommodating design operations. Engineering design students were divided into two groups based on their individual orientation—namely the mastery and performance oriented types. The homogeneous groups reinforced the individual strategies and the effects on their operations could be observed. The distinct orientations had an impact on the open-ended design challenge. Results indicate considerations for conflicts between solving and setting, which might affect the involvement of users and their needs as resources in early product development. This study addresses how individual orientations in homogeneous groups have an effect on user-centered design in open-ended design tasks. Highlighting differences contributes to understanding challenges in innovation activities. The study indicates that students need different guidance and coaching to match their orientations.

Today, a new knowledge economy and more service-based offerings are commonly mentioned as a challenge for manufacturing companies. This challenge addresses the companies’ knowledge base and the traditional engineering expertise areas. The report starts from an assumption that there are differences in how knowledge is managed, as well as differences in the intentions to why it is managed. Based on this assumption, the purpose in the report is two-folded. First, the purpose is to conceptualize different facets of knowledge within a framework of technical product development. Second, the purpose is that the report serves as a trigger for discussions and reflections on existing practices in industrial workshops. So, despite that the report does not provide the “right” answers to these questions; they still guide the work in our research:• What is actually managed in every-day engineering project work?• And, for what purposes?The work accounted for in the report comes from a literature review and our jointefforts in understanding the research area from a theoretical perspective. First general views on knowledge is presented, including its classification in different ways, compared to information and data, as well as its division into tacit and explicit knowledge, or practical skills and theoretical knowledge. Human factors, including how people search for information, is also presented. Then a more explicit focus on technical knowledge is presented, showing the shift from knowledge as an artefact to a social and personal perspective in recent years. This also encompasses discussing the capabilities and knowledge of an engineer. A contribution of this report is the conceptualization of different facets of engineering knowledge; especially the more social aspects of engineering knowledge have been highlighted.

The paper presents a study based on two views, i.e. innovation in teams of non-designers and live case interactions. This means that a diverse set of roles are involved in the innovation activities that originate from real regional situations. The application area relates to design and development of destinations, e.g. regions, tourism and attractive places. This study focuses on two main issues, namely (a) is it possible to make non-designers momentarily become design thinkers, and (b) is it possible to produce ideas and 'out-of-the-box' views in groups consisting of non-designers within a short timeframe? The purpose of this paper is thus to illustrate and explain these issues in order to contribute to a live case platform for collaborative innovation among society, trade and industry, and universities. The empirical data from four workshops, in total engaging 179 participants, shows that there are several challenges related to the efforts to transfer techniques and methods for design thinking and innovation into the heads and hands of non-designers. For example, trade and business can rarely allocate regular working hours for participatory design thinking, so they act based on traditional professional roles. Also, sessions turn into (unproductive) discussions if the participants are not firmly facilitated and encouraged. Bringing in live cases through the participation of mixed teams places additional requirements on innovation research in respect of implementation and packaging for practical uses.

Regional research project are, as is also regional industry, highly need-based. That is, understanding the stakeholders' (or customers') real challenges and related needs is important. This study is based on interviews with SMEs in the Northern parts of Finland, Norway and Sweden, but also on available innovation agendas and strategies for each country. The differences among the companies in those regions bring forward distinct needs, while many experience similar challenges, for example low population density, long distances and a high dependency on basic industries. Innovation is identified as a key driver of regional growth and competitiveness. SMEs rarely employ the term innovation to describe their activities, but rather stress 'knowing the customer' as important. This indicates one of the challenges to implement innovation strategy as a driver for growth and competitiveness

This paper is based on a descriptive study of two types of innovation awards within a manufacturing company. The purpose is to identify sources and understand the background of these awarded innovations. An industrial view of the concept innovation is of importance in order to support future product development processes. Based on the interviews of several team members in awarded innovation projects, some aspects can be emphasized: the importance of the exploration and knowledge acquisition phase, importance of external triggers and that innovation is not a linear process.

An innovative design process which has been conducted under the restrictions during the covid-19 pandemic is in focus in this study. Visits were banned so user-centred design activities were particularly challenged by the necessity to meet and work online. The purpose of the study is to present and reflect on how user-centred design was done under those conditions. The potential users, the reindeer herders, were merely contacted online, the user investigation were supported by for example using videos and storytelling. Also, the final concept is presented.

This paper problematizes and discuss a change towards new business models in order to highlight some basic challenges of digital transformation needed for Industry 4.0. A particular effort is to discuss if SMEs may have sufficient means to capitalize on such a new paradigm. As an approach to enable problematization and discussion, the paper presents concepts and standpoints that are related to the fourth industrial revolution. For example, the idea of new business models is a concept taken for granted, and is not sufficiently contextualized into digital transformation and Industry 4.0. The discussion sheds some light on the benefit of SMEs' flexibility, while simultaneously it finds mindsets challenges related to change and transformation as critical.

The research field of Product-Service Systems (PSS) emerged within the engineering design field to address sustainability and radically lower environmental impact from production and product use stages. PSS research has progressed insights of the industrial phenomena, but are often grounded in either product or service development, and the sustainability perspective had diminished over time. The deviation from what was intended might depend on research methodologies that do not meet the requirements of PSS multidisciplinary research. Some reflections of our research and craftsmanship are thus needed, which is also the purpose of this paper. PSS are used in the paper as a framework to highlight some of the facets of engineering design research activities. The paper suggests that multidisciplinary research has to manage different methodologies and different theories, this can be achieved if underlying assumptions are made transparent and if contradictions between those and the conclusions are discussed. Finally, the paper make an effort to encourage discussions about research methodologies to improve not only research but also implementation in industry.

Starting from interactions with SMEs from a number of different areas, this short paper addresses the challenges of turning hands-on practice into an online supports tool for innovation. The SMEs are found in the North of Finland and the North of Sweden, thus already facing challenges related to the sparsely populated areas. Yet, digitalization and online support may become one way to bridge distances as well as filling knowledge gaps between different domains. Nevertheless, the suggestion to transform practical know-how into an online tool that can be globally accessed and used is non-trivial. Thus, problematizing such ideas could progress these efforts.

Digitalization is a source for Industrial Internet, which solutions influence businesses and everyday life in many different ways. The digital transformation calls for understanding, not only about your customers, but also your whole organization. A digital business world opens up for seamless and borderless collaborations in product, service and production development, yet such a visionary future need both systematic and systemic changes in companies. As such open innovation approaches including participatory research studies could support regional growth and increase competitiveness among SMEs. This article describes how these issues have been managed in a transnational project for the Northern Nordics.

De tre delarna i hållbarhetsperspektivet, dvs. ekologiska, ekonomiska och sociala, bör ses som en integrerad helhet, men det är också det som är utmaningen. Projektet söker undersöka och exemplifiera olika intressenters perspektiv och därmed den kunskapsbas de tar med sig in i en produktutvecklingsprocess. Projektet syftar till att demonstrera hur olika intressenters värden stödjer eller inte stödjer en hållbar utveckling.

In the manufacturing industry, offering services as the value carrier of the product is becoming a key interest. In short, the product concept changes from something engineered to providing “performance in use” in order to fulfill customer needs. This change of paradigm, from an established view of products as nothing else than physical artefacts to the idea of products as service offerings, is commonly described in the research field called Product ServiceSystems (PSS). Examples of expected benefits of PSS for manufacturing companies are that they can: (1) meet the sustainability challenges, (2) manage competition, and (3) provide added value to their customers. The knowledge base in manufacturing companies is firmly based in engineering activities and computer support for the design of artefacts is well developed (e.g., Computer Aided Design). However, it can be argued that the guiding principles, or the technological support, for PSS cannot be built upon the idea of products as engineered. A central message of this conceptual paper is that the introduction of PSS may challenge not only companies, but also design engineer education. The paper investigates the challenges and proposes activities that could bridge the gap between developing stand-alone products and service offerings.

This paper presents measures for collaborative design in a social context. A number of challenges and implications are identified, and changes done to increase the innovativeness in the outcome are discussed and exemplified. The context is an innovation contest in which students, inhabitants, people in common and so on, freely signs up for participation. The competition's theme comes from a client, e.g. a company, organization or municipality. Besides a research approach originating from 2002, fourteen innovation competitions during 2014-2015 are the specific basis for the empirical data.

Interreg Nord

NPA – Target (Making Regional Manufacturing Globally Competitive and Innovative)This project will develop tools to enhance capacity of manufacturing companies in the NPA region to adapt and embrace new technologies and innovation. The toolbox developed will consist of subsets such as Digital manufacturing (robotics and simulation), New ideas and thinking (human centred and environmental thinking, competitiveness), Business models and modern Product innovation.

The Innovations and Industrial Internet project was formed with partners from Luleå University of Technology, Sweden, Centria University of Applied Sciences, Finland, and University of Tromsø, campus Narvik, Norway. The work has addressed an increase in small and medium sized enterprises’ competences of applying modern digital technology to benefit product- and service development in the region. Almost 40 companies have been keenly involved in the project’s activities, which have included, for example, case studies, demonstrations, workshops and seminars. The close academia and company collaborations has resulted in SMEs’ test and evaluation of new technologies, in turn leading to the implementation of new methods that were new to 16 of those companies.

The project collaborations have resulted in 9 products and services that were new to the companies. A number of cross-border collaborations among companies and universities across the program region have been finalized, for example a case on 3D printing and boat production which involved all partners competences. The cross-border added value does not only encompass the open accessible milieu bringing all partners expertise together to benefit SMEs in the region, but it also identified and mitigated barriers between knowledge domains, like the ones occurring in value chain collaborations where digital solutions often dissolve some aspects of a problem while simultaneously cause new ones.

The project has had a fairly good representation of females in leading positions since the project leader and one country’s leader are females, but also the female representation in activities has been good.

The project has been nominated to the Regio Stars Award 2017.

In the vision of Product-Service Systems (PSS) there is anticipation on stakeholders to develop sound networks to enable and support innovative product and service solutions. As such PSS business relationships could be viewed as innovation systems. The challenge to find appropriate and relevant stakeholders is commonly mentioned in manufacturing industry as a difficult task. This paper elaborates on such a challenge, but has put an emerging industry as a frame of interest in order to discuss the progress of a innovation system which has the purpose to inspire product and service development based on commercial human space flights. Some managerial implications for PSS innovation system development are made, for example it is suggested to implement a learning environment as a “demonstrator” from which an innovation system can evolve.

ngineers have to develop their social skills due to being exposed to new types of problems and situations as a result of manufacturing companies' movement towards providing systematic solutions e.g., product-service systems. The authors assume that

The focus on knowledge management have since long been recognized in literature and undoubtedly benefited organizations. More recently companies claim themselves to be ‘knowledge-driven’. Indeed, the concept of knowledge-driven incorporates experiences. Typically, factual knowledge has a transparent management approach, while experience sharing is highly prioritized but not straightforward. This study addresses experience sharing and proposes a perspective to support reflection upon practice in innovation projects. The study builds on a longitudinal acquisition of empirical data obtained in a manufacturing company acting on a global market. In particular, early innovation projects have been a source for data collection. Interviews with knowledge workers, observations from daily work activities and reading internal documents provide the empirical material for the study. The study has resulted in a visualization of different kinds of issues concerning experience sharing. The visualization has been a base for highlighting industrial implications and proposing actions.

Collaborative user oriented design activities are difficult experiences that need to be practiced. Doing so in a professional setting, but without prior experience, can and probably will jeopardize the whole project. So, it is important for design education to offer students the possibility to collaborate in student projects and to assign them to solve open-ended problems. However, it is of interest to find out how differing motivations for individuals affect their team’s ability to successfully meet user needs. This has been investigated in an experiment where students were categorised into two distinct models of design motivation. It was found that one of these models was more apt to manage user orientation in the design team. In this paper, the design of the experiment per se is outlined in order to invite more research within the area.

Manufacturing industry is expressing an increased interest in knowledge management due to the extension towards aservice provision business model. However, the inclusion of softer service aspects indicates that the common view onknowledge management as a way to control and monitor a technical process have limitations. Sharing expertise is anadditional way of managing knowledge particularly with the intentions to make experience based knowledgeorganizational available. By studying product developers’ daily work, especially how they perceive that they apply andshare knowledge, we problematize knowledge activities in product-service development to discuss the establishedknowledge management activities. The paper suggests some considerations to support the development of aknowledge base for product-service design.

The additive manufacturing method is more commonly known as three-dimensional (3D) printing. Traditionally, physical products have been fabricated by subtracting the material using machining tools. With modern technology, however, a wide range of materials, even metal, can be printed. In this method, the object is formed by adding layers of material. The INTERREG North project Innovations & Industrial Internet (I3) created innovative experiments with a 3D printer. The comparative 3D printing demonstration described in this paper was produced in collaboration with Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian research partners. The purpose of the demonstration was to verify 3D printing as a method for producing scale models of products.

PROJEKTSAMMANFATTNINGPIEp, Product Innovation Engineering Program är ett nationellt program som syftar till att stärka förmågan till innovativ produkt- och affärsutveckling. PIEp spänner över fältet från teori till praktik, från forskning om innovationssystem till proaktivt arbete för att stärka innovationskraft och därigenom uppnå en systemförändring inom forskning, utbildning och utveckling. PIEp skall pågå under tio år, 2007-2016 och engagera flera av Sveriges lärosäten och forskningsinstitut involverade i innovation och produktutveckling. PIEp leds och administreras vid KTH i partnerskap med Lunds Tekniska Högskola, Högskolan i Jönköping, Designhögskolan vid Umeå Universitet, Centrum för Teknik, Medicin och Hälsa, Luleå Tekniska Universitet, samt en rad företag och organisationer.

Begreppet product-service systems (PSS), eller funktionella produkter, förutspås ha betydande påverkan för ett framtida hållbart samhälle. Ett PSS-synsätt kommer att förändra hur produkter och tjänster används, men också förändra tillvägagångssättet i utvecklingen, eftersom ansvaret för den fysiska produkten genom hela dess livscykel kvarstår hos företaget eller konsortiet som utvecklar PSS-lösningen. I och med detta kan aktiviteterna med omkonstruktion, återanvändning och återvinning, utföras på ett totalt annorlunda sätt än i dag. I den här situationen blir kapaciteten att ständigt förbättra kundupplevt värde genom nya lösningar en viktig förmåga. Således står utvecklingsteam idag inför två stora utmaningar; dels ska de kunna hantera mer abstrakta kundbehov, dels ska de på ett effektivt sätt ständigt bidra till nya lösningar. Det här projektets mål är att stödja PSS-utvecklingsteamets innovationsprocess genom att föreslå faciliterande metoder och verktyg. Specifikt fokus ligger på följande aspekter för att bidra till utvecklingen av en sammanhängande metodologi för team-baserad innovation:- Identifiering, analys och kommunikation av kundbehov samt modellering av värde- Tvärfunktionella team- Effektiv kunskapsdelning- Modellering och visualisering av lösningar baserat på ett kunskapslivscykel perspektiv Projektet kommer att vara en gemensam prestation av industri- och akademirepresentanter. Det praktiska arbetet kommer att utföras i ett nära samarbete. I stort vägleds projektet av antagandet att – visualisering av affärs- och utvecklingsrelaterad kunskap samt snabba modellerings- och simuleringsmöjligheter i tidiga faser stödjer PSS-teamets förmåga att finna nya lösningar och genomföra hållbar utveckling. Förutom ökad kunskap om strategier och tillvägagångssätt för team-baserad innovation kommer demonstratorer av verktyg och metoder vara ett resultat av projektarbetet.

This paper presents the rationale for the design of a card deck game sustaining information security training. The efforts have followed design thinking, been inspired by an approach for problem-based learning, and used gamification. The card deck game primarily aims to support entrepreneurs in small and medium-sized manufacturing companies, heading towards the introduction of digital services, yet is also useful for anyone to practice risk awareness. Information security, here in short representing the efforts to protect information and mitigate risks to uphold confidentiality, integrity and availability, is by SMEs often seen as a technical problem, but is depending on human behaviour. Literature on security training, emphasises the relevance of interpersonal dialogues and reflection, such reflection is not supported by traditional education, as for instance reading theory and answering questions. The application of gamification has shown to increase awareness, where the play becomes an eye-opener to progress focused dialogues and learning.

Ingenjörens kompetenser beskrivs traditionellt som tekniskt orienterade. Eftersom industrin i dag är i en omvandling, mycket pga. klimatkrisen, men även pga. digitaliseringen, blir samverkan och innovation i kombination med tekniska baskunskaper ett uttryckt behov att tillgodose i ingenjörsutbildningar. Sådan mellanmänsklig och mer abstrakt kompetens blir central för arbete i tvärfunktionella utvecklingsteam, men även för utveckling av allt mer tjänsteinriktade produkter. Studenters olika preferenser för hur de tar sig an öppna problem är en utmaning för varje lärare i campusundervisningen, men blir allt mer utmanande att hantera i distansutbildningen. I det här bidraget reflekterar vi över våra erfarenheter från utbildning av ingenjörer inom innovativ produktdesign, tillsammans med erfarenheter från utveckling och genomförande av distans- och hybridkurser. Syftet är att dela med oss av våra erfarenheter hur studenter tar sig an en öppen frågeställning, dvs. verklighetsbaserade problem. Med bidraget vill vi inspirera till samtal om distansundervisningens hinder och möjligheter specifikt för moment som kräver att studenten reflekterar på ett annorlunda sätt.

Small and medium sized firms’ businesses in rural regions typically address a home market and the delivery of niched products. This makes them exposed to business downturns, innovation is thus one way to survive and prosper. Small-scale product development is typically very hands-on, a sort of trial and error process. This experimental way is in favour for the implementation of innovation processes, but one challenge is the limited resources that firms can, or are willing to, spend on innovative work. A challenge is that procedures for organisational learning are lacking in the straightforward approach. The article describes the background and rationale for supporting small-scale manufacturing by introducing a support toolbox for early product development work. The support toolbox’s rationale is built upon learning cycles and communicative prototyping which may enhance innovation process capabilities.

The Create-Build-Test-Learn supports toolbox for engineering concept development motivates not only experimentation, but also instils design thinking in teams. By offering tools and methods for reconstruction of the design challenge, the approach prevents teams to jump into a solution too quickly. When using prototyping as a team resource, reframing of the problem becomes part of the process, ensuring that efforts are put on solving the right problem. The article describes the contents of the toolbox as well as exemplifies how to use it. CBTL has been designed in particular to support SMEs.

TARGET is a collaborative project involving a partnership of universities and institutes of higher education in UK, Ireland, Norway, Finland and Sweden. The project will develop tools to enhance capacity in regional manufacturing companies to adapt and embrace new technologies and innovation. This is to be done in collaboration with small/medium sized manufacturing engineering companies - developing, applying and piloting the tools through individual companies' processes. The Toolbox developed will consist of subsets such as Digital manufacturing (robotics and simulation), New Ideas and Thinking (human centred and environmental thinking, competitiveness), Business Models and modern Product Innovation. On completion of the Project, the Toolbox of supports will be made available for use through open access to manufacturing companies. The initial project phase with development of a Toolbox suitable for use in all the project partners' regions is presented.

Three different cases are presented in this paper, they describe how product development are conducted in micro-sized companies. All companies have novel ideas that they strive to realize into an engineered product and in some cases they also provide an integrated service. Typically, product development literature emphasizes systematic development processes to sustain viable businesses. Often a phased process is suggested as the optimal model. We have found that viable micro-sized companies do not employ such processes, but rather what, seemingly, is an ad-hoc procedure for each type of solution. By doing so they face challenges to grow and to upscale the production. A key result from this study is the finding of a gap between current product development literature and the actual needs of micro-sized firms.

Digital technology is embedded in most of organizations’ offerings and processes. With this trend comes also a need of being able to collect the opportunities that emerge during the development of these products, services and processes. For this reason, it has been identified that in early phases of development, methodologies that support communication and knowledge creation (i.e. prototyping) is key. Though prototyping is a natural part of development of physical products, it is less common in digital innovation and development. This study addresses this by developing a conceptual framework for prototyping for digital innovation. By taking a comprehensive view on prototypes, implications for development are analysed and developed based on the complex nature and ontology of digital  technology.

The aim of this project was to explore the possibility to smartly integrate food production in cold urban environments. The main objective was to sketch an intelligent platform to guide a comprehensive, city-wide approach to urban farming in winter cities and assist city stakeholder.

We have worked with large databases related to energy consumptions, performances, building stock and size, solar radiation, and so forth. The challenge for us was to integrate big data in a manner that is easy to understand and visualize for all audiences while matching the ambitions of local stakeholders for urban farming.

Urban farming (UF) has social, economic, and environmental benefits: socially UF will bring people closer to nature and it can become a source of education for local schools and community; economically, UF targets the rapidly growing market of premium, fresh, biological food that is proudly produced locally and can be sold to local restaurants and other customers; environmentally, UF will decrease our reliance from far away and poorly controlled food chains, while decreasing environmental costs for transportation.

Product-Service Systems (PSS) or, life-cycle offerings, is a challenge for knowledge sharing within manufacturing industry due to an integration of intangible (tacit) and tangible (explicit) domains. One consequence is that the engineers’ have to make sense of abstract customer information in early development. For this, they need computer support. Method developers are employees that are responsible for in-house development of such support. There are similarities in their contemporary work practices and some aspects of the development of life-cycle offerings. The intent in this paper is to draw from the method developers’ experiences in managing acquisition of user information for the purpose to contribute to knowledge sharing in early development. We have found that the problem-setting approach applied by the method developers could help the identification, analysis and application of user needs, thus also could be applied to identify metrics/characteristics for intangibles.

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Förhoppningen är att de bidragit till vattenförsörjningen i utvecklingsländerna. Det handlar om Luleåstudenters arbete med att till rimlig kostnad producera dricksvatten ur luft.I går redovisade universitetsstudenterna Jenny Åhman, Erik Brännström, Pontus Sundberg och Johan Wenngren sitt examensarbete. Det samlas rent synbart i Mímir, en prototyp till en vattenproducent som går på elström och ordnar drickbart vatten till under en krona litern

Att kläcka en god idé är kanske ingen konst, men att göra något av den och dessutom få ut den på marknaden är desto svårare. På Arena innovativ teknik och företagande på Luleå tekniska universitet får studenterna utbildning i att ta hand om goda idéer och starta eget. Utbildningen drivs i nära samarbete med Almi Norrbotten.

The concept development stage is a fundamental part of the development process; in this early stage, teams define what constitutes the problem and find direction for the subsequent problem-solving activities. Concept development that searches for innovative results starts from a problem formulation, or design brief, that should not be too precise; keeping parts open for interpretation and alternatives is important for allowing for the possibility to create new solutions. However, handling such open-ended development problems is a challenge as they do not point to a specific solution from the start. The difficulties that the development team encounters in order to find a way forward are the focus of this thesis. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is to identify, describe and discuss how teams explore and define open-ended problems in concept development. Fundamentally, teams have to explore and define open-ended problems in order to retrieve answers needed to undertake purposeful actions. The exploration and definition procedure creates stepwise understanding of sub-problems as open-ended problems typically have interdependencies. This implies that the team must suggest a number of representations before they can propose corresponding alternative solutions. The failure to adopt such a procedure leads to a risk of fixation and prematurely closing the definition of what constitutes the core issues of the design problem. This study specifically shows that confronting the design brief or task is an essential activity in the resolution of open-ended problems. Moreover, a number of practical steps for iteratively managing open-ended problem resolution are proposed. The study in this thesis is based on an explorative approach utilising experiments and observations as methods for data collection. The empirical data come from a workshop format (i.e., an innovation contest), teams on student projects and, to some extent, companies. The contribution from this thesis to engineering design relates mainly to the social and participatory aspects of innovation in concept development. The contribution to practice is mainly the formulation of iterative steps; these could be applicable to different types of open-ended problem resolution. One additional area of application may be a more modern type of product development in the manufacturing industry — namely, where product logics and service logics are interlinked.

Manufacturing firms’ attention to innovations and the innovation process has during the last decade gained in intensity of interest. One trigger for such an interest is that these companies have extended their business models towards an integrated product-service approach, where the introduction of a service perspective in early development challenges the traditionally temporary formative nature of processes. This new business model of Product-Service Systems (PSS) puts an emphasis on delivering added value to the customer: instead of providing goods the manufacturing firm should provide a service based solution. This does not mean that they stop producing physical goods, but rather that more service aspects should be considered by the engineering team in the planning and design of the goods. When the ownership of the physical goods stays within the firm it is through a challenge and an opportunity to provide “what the user wants” and, at the same time, what is beneficial for the firm. Hence, an innovative and dynamic organisation is desirable. Typically, in product development the team consists of engineers that are domain experts, but novices when it comes to understanding services and often in interpreting customer information. For a firm to create product-service solutions that meet customer needs, innovation and creativity within the early development processes are important (thus the aspects that have gained an increased interest among manufacturing firms). Product development is commonly viewed as an innovative process, though the degree of innovation is usually low (i.e. incremental improvements of the goods). The integration of services into early development could be perceived as radically challenging such an innovation process. The purpose in this thesis is to improve the understanding of development teams working with PSS innovation. This is done in order to facilitate discussion of the challenges for a firm to shift into a product-service process. The empirical data in this study comes from a business-to-business company in the aeronautical industry, but also from student innovation projects. The focus for the study is how teams collaborate in early phases of innovation projects. The qualitative data was generated by performing both observations and interviews. The results indicate not only the importance of heterogeneous teams in the innovation process but also the lack of a sufficient approach for innovative PSS development. Because of this, new tools and methods are vital, but this is not to ignore how traditional tools and methods can be reused and retro-fitted into such a process. Further, the results indicate that personal motivation has an impact on how teams perform innovation activities. This could have the implication that, for example, a goal-oriented engineer surrounded by similarly motivated teammates could more likely fail in interpreting customer information because none of them is likely to assign importance to that information. Therefore, to support engineers to provide product-service solutions not only methods and tools, but also training for how to perform and reflect on user needs could be necessary. KeywordsProduct-Service Systems, Team Based Innovation, Radical Innovation, User oriented design, Engineering design

Open-ended problems provides a window for innovations, but understanding the actual problem is challenging. Typically, teams might settle on their first impression as the design problem. Such an approach usually ends up in, not a bad solution, but in a solution that might not solve the right problem. Radical innovation literature suggests that teams should challenge their perspective of the problem, e.g. frame and reframe it, before solving it. This paper presents a study of how framing and reframing contributes to determining the constraints of two different types of design problems. A project course provides the particular data for the study, the result indicate that technological oriented problems needs support that forces the team to diverge from their initial design vision and that radical oriented problems needs support that encourage deliberation in the team. In conclusion support is required to be flexible, in open-ended design tasks, to fit its purpose.

Changed conditions in manufacturing industries' business strategies, i.e. intentions to earn more revenue from service provision, motivate the introduction of rough and sketchy prototypes as part of the learning and collaboration activities. This paper presents and compares changed conditions between traditional and novel in general, but particularly exemplifies the importance of prototyping in such a new setting. This is done, not only to inspire CogInfoCom research, but also to contribute to the use of prototyping and learning in modern product development. The paper's objective is to discuss how prototyping can benefit radical thinking and learning for innovation.

Firms seeking radical innovation require development teams to articulate design solutions based on open-ended problems. Such problems have no single answer to the problematical situation, but have several plausible solutions. Although prior studies have highlighted the importance of prototyping or other methodologies, they provide limited guidance toward addressing open-ended problems. We investigate how teams make sense of complex design and development problems in order to benefit innovative endeavors. The results illustrate a team-level concept development model that identifies critical stages, associated activities, and influencing mind-set to explain how engineering teams overcome challenges associated with open-ended problems

Business models focused on the design and development of value propositions consisting of a mix of products and services have in recent years become more common among companies. Problems related to trust issues have although led to that companies have difficulties to fully implement these new business models. This paper demonstrates and discuss how distributed ledgers, for example blockchains, can support trust and collaboration among decentralized actors in a value chain network. A demonstrator has been developed and show that decentralization of value chains is possible within certain frames.

Prototyping is an important part of any development activity since it supports communication and knowledge creation among the members of the developing organization. Although prototyping is well established in the development of physical products, less is known about its use and effect on digital service innovation and development. Since digital technologies today are embedded in almost every level of an organization, from its processes to its offerings, it can be argued that it is crucial for an organization to be able to handle not only digital aspects of prototyping, but also physical and digital aspects simultaneously. This study addresses this need by exploring the impact of digital technology on prototyping, answering the research question “How does digital technology affect the different elements of prototyping?” By taking a comprehensive view on prototypes, implications for development are analyzed and developed based on the complex nature and ontology of digital technology. The result encompasses a set of nine different propositions for digital prototyping which contributes to both academia and the work of practitioners.

Product-Service Systems (PSS) introduces the possibility to change into a resultoriented perspective of product development. This means a focus on ‘performance of the product’, rather than on the standalone goods. Also, PSS is foreseen to bring about possibilities to address sustainability in early phases of product development. For instance remanufacture and upgrading of the goods become attainable in different ways than before. In aeronautic industry PSS is seen as an opportunity to deal with the issues of sustainability, for example lowering CO2 and NOX emissions of the jet engine. In turn, the companies have to learn how to manage more abstract information from customers, but also, address breakthrough innovation in collaboration with partner companies. This paper builds on empirical studies for the purpose to contend with the question how knowledgebased (KBE) tools used in companies today are apt to manage innovation aspects.