Conference Speakers

Research and innovation strategies for smart specialisation (RIS3) adopted by the EU countries and regions in the 2014-2020 programming period introduced a new paradigm for advancing national and regional competitiveness: priority-setting and targeted investments in distinctive research and innovation regional strengths and areas of regional comparative advantage can move a country or region up in international value chains and boost structural economic change. This new vision for innovation and technology-driven regional growth requires vast efforts at several levels, from specific investments to modernise the EU industry and shift away from low value-added industrial products, to new forms of research and innovation governance and new models of education and competence-building in the current and next generations of workforce. All that comes in the context of new challenges and transformations of the Industry 4.0 era, marked by dynamic production and adoption of new technologies (e.g. AI, digital technologies, big data, IoT) and technological diversification, by ever growing competition in the new technology domains, and a continuous strive to provide adequate policies and financing for the development of technology, as well as of human capital. What is the impact of these challenges on universities – will Industry 4.0 impact be concentrated primarily at the level of engineering and computer science departments or will pervade broadly into the university structure, activities and institutional procedures? How can SMEs benefit more from the enormous economic potential of Industry 4.0? How do government agencies and society respond to these dynamics? This talk will review some of these challenges and will focus mainly on the impact of Industry 4.0 on the university agenda. Some specific changes that need to be implemented in relation with their business partners and society at large will be highlighted, pointing out ow Smart Specialisation can help in that effort.

The question of organizing innovative projects has a long tradition. Shenhar made a plea for a contingency approach, i.e. highly innovative projects should be organized in a different way. Cooper emphasized the importance of the early stages of a project and early integration of customer and market requirements. The ideation literature stressed creativity and an innovation-supporting culture. All this ideas for managing single projects are evidence-based and used. They are necessary – but not sufficient.

The development of program management and project portfolio management has added the view, that firms do not only manage single projects, but also a concurrent set of projects, that are included in a portfolio or program management. This created a stronger link to corporate strategy. Objectives of project portfolio management are maximization of portfolio value, strategic fit of the project, and balancing the projects in consideration of capacities, overall portfolio risk, and synergies between projects. In our empirical research done at TU Berlin and continued at TU Darmstadt, we found a lot of success factors, that matter for all kinds of investigated project e.g. portfolios formalization, strategic clarity, stakeholder orientation, business case monitoring, ideation and agility. However, firms with a high entrepreneurial orientation, which includes future orientation, striving for innovation, and the willingness to take risks, given adequate opportunities, show much higher impacts of such factors, because entrepreneurial orientation positively moderates the influences. Interestingly, the successful innovators did not give a higher dose of strategic clarity, stakeholder orientation, or business case monitoring – they invested only an average amount. But, they created a different context, i.e. they motivated and supported people more in the ideation stage, created career systems to give them a perspective and harvested a higher competence retention and more committed employees. They also showed a higher agility, which means in this context that they decided quicker when they had sufficient transparency and that they implemented their decisions in much more comprehensive way. However, even these and other factors are only necessary, but still not sufficient.

We are convinced that a new generation of project management should consider the fact that projects are embedded in a historical path of projects. This will make project management more attractive for strategic management and for innovation management, and may also be used to discuss e.g. the relationship between projects that create an infrastructure and others that use or re-use it.

This talk discusses the concept of cyber-physical engineering (CPE) for the study and design of automation systems in the presence of strong interdependencies between the physical and computational processes that do not allow to effectively model systems within classic paradigms of control engineering or computer science. The principle of cyber-physical engineering, discussed in this talk, assumes the use of languages and means of interdisciplinary modelling at all stages of design, analysis and operation of systems. This leads us to the concept of cyber-physical component (CPC) as an artefact used in both engineering and verification.

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