Publikationen

This paper presents cooperative design as method to address the needs of SMEs to gain sufficient knowledge about new technologies in order for them to decide about adoption for knowledge management. We developed and refined a cooperative design method iteratively over nine use cases. In each use case, the goal was to match the SME’s knowledge management needs with offerings of new (to the SMEs) technologies. Where traditionally, innovation adoption and diffusion literature assume new knowledge to be transferred from knowledgeable stakeholders to less knowledgeable stakeholders, our method is built on cooperative design. In this, the relevant knowledge is constructed by the SMEs who wish to decide upon the adoption of novel technologies through the cooperative design process. The presented method is constituted of an analysis stage based on activity theory and a design stage based on paper prototyping and design workshops. In all nine cases, our method led to a good understanding a) of the domain by researchers – validated by the creation of meaningful first-version paper prototypes and b) of new technologies – validated by meaningful input to design and plausible assessment of technologies’ benefit for the respective SME. Practitioners and researchers alike are invited to use the here documented tools to cooperatively match the domain needs of practitioners with the offerings of new technologies. The value of our work lies in providing a concrete implementation of the cooperative design paradigm that is based on an established theory (activity theory) for work analysis and established tools of cooperative design (paper prototypes and design workshops as media of communication); and a discussion based on nine heterogeneous use cases.

Digitization is currently one of the major factors changing society and the business world. Most research focused on the technical issues of this change, but also employees and especially the way how they learn changes dramatically. In this paper, we are interested in exploring the perspectives of decision makers in huge manufacturing companies on current challenges in organizing learning and knowledge distribution in digitized manufacturing environments. Moreover, weinvestigated the change process and challenges of implementing new knowledge and learning processes.To this purpose, we have conducted 24 interviews with senior representatives of large manufacturing companies from Austria, Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Our exploratory study shows that decision makers perceive significant changes in work practice of manufacturing due to digitization and they currently plan changes in organizational training and knowledge distribution processes in response. Due to the lack of best practices, companies focus verymuch on technological advancements. The delivery of knowledge just-in-time directly into work practice is afavorite approach. Overall, digital learning services are growing and new requirements regarding compliance,quality management and organisational culture arise.

Organisations participate in collaborative projects that include competitors for a number of strategic reasons, even whilst knowing that this requires them to consider both knowledge sharing and knowledge protection throughout collaboration. In this paper, we investigated which knowledge protection practices representatives of organizations employ in a collaborative research and innovation project that can be characterized as a co-opetitive setting. We conducted a series of 30 interviews and report the following seven practices in structured form: restrictive partner selection in operative project tasks, communication through a gatekeeper, to limit access to a central platform, to hide details of machine data dumps, to have data not leave a factory for analysis, a generic model enabling to hide usage parameters, and to apply legal measures. When connecting each practice to a priori literature, we find three practices focussing on collaborative data analytics tasks had not yet been covered so far.