Innovation portfolio management (IPM) aims at selecting ideas with regard to their potential for innovation and measuring them considering customer and business value. The evaluation of benefits and risk is especially challenging for disruptive innovation (DI) due to their characteristics such as low comparability to existing technologies and uncertain customer reactions. This paper highlights the lack of approaches to managing DI in IPM and addresses it through a framework that expands the understanding of value-orientation in IPM, allowing for the inclusion of DI.

Systems thinking is vital for engineering of nowadays systems characterized by system spanning interactions and an incresing amount of functions. Systems Engineering (SE) represents an interdisciplinary approach, gaining extensive attention to cope with increasing system complexity. Implementation of SE in existing organizations and processes, however, is facing challenges. As a matter of course there is not out of the box concept to be used, in fact definitions and understandings seem to be based on the background and experience of the individual or organization und differ widely. Thus, motivations and expectations of practitioner are manifold and support to adapte and implement SE-methodolgies is needed. Research presented in this contribution picks up the need to provide orientation for individuals, engineering teams and project managers when implementing SE and to address the specific context in that engineering is carried out. Objective is to describe the core idea of SE by a consistent set of principles. This set is used to build up a context specific understanding of SE as a foundation to introduce new methods and procedures in existing method ecosystems.

Zusammenfassung Dieses Praxisbeispiel der Zeitschrift "Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation (GIO)" betrachtet den Fall einer virtuellen Inbetriebnahme bei einem Unternehmen aus dem Anlagen-und Maschinenbau aus soziotechnischer Systemperspektive. In einer digitalisierten Arbeitswelt werden Tätigkeiten zunehmend in den virtuellen Raum verlagert, sodass mit Hilfe digitale Abbilder beispielsweise Simulationen durchgeführt werden können. Bevor die Maschine real in Betrieb genommen wird, soll die Inbetriebnahme durch eine Simulation mittels Software erfolgen. Das Zusammenspiel der Steuerungssoftware und Hardwarekomponenten einer Maschine wird dabei mit dem Ziel, Fehler und Probleme frühzeitiger zu erkennen, simuliert und geprüft. Diese neue Entwicklungstechnologie und deren Implementierung in den Produktentwicklungsprozess wird vor dem Hintergrund eines soziotechnischen Systemverständnisses reflektiert. Im Praxisbeispiel erfolgt eine Analyse und Gestaltung von Mensch, Technik und Organisation sowie deren Wechselspiel. Es zeigt sich, dass die virtuelle Inbetriebnahme simultane Entwicklungsprozesse bei der Bearbeitung von Kundenaufträgen sowie dadurch eine stärkere modulartige Vernetzung der beteiligten Entwicklungsdomänen nahelegt. Diese Prozesse gehen mit erhöhten Anforderungen an die Mitarbeitenden in Bezug auf Medienkompetenzen sowie Selbstkompetenzen einher.

Reflection is understood as an integral part of designing and design processes. Despite the high relevance and an ongoing discussion about agile engineering, we found that reflection is rarley established in industrial practice. There is a need for an approach structuring the wide range of levels, stakeholders, objects and timing of reflections. The introduced RECAP framework is an important step towards a guideline (heuristic) for reflection in engineering projects. Based on the four dimensions objectives, stakeholders, objects, and processes it supports structured planning of reflection.

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Abstract. Shorter product life cycle as well as higher product complexity and diversity require more flexible manufacturing systems. Dynamic reconfiguration is a time efficient way to adapt system properties to rapidly changing process requirements. The potential to reconfigure parallel mechanisms depends on specific and optimized machine components, which enable modification of kinematic behaviour of the system. In this contribution influence of several component parameters on system properties and the needs to develop more suitable machine components are highlighted. Furthermore, a possibility to adapt kinematic properties of a planar RRRRR-mechanism, using an adaptive revolute joint, is introduced.

Today's design processes involve various persons and disciplines. Process participants are often distributed in different sites and might have diverse cultures. Thus, collaborations are often confusing due to the different parties. This paper uses a model considering 3 layers of collaborations: process, methods & tools and competencies & qualification. Each layer is modelled or supported by existing tools but a holistic modelling approach to represent relations between the 3 layers is missing. This research work proposes a modelling approach showing design processes on all 3 layers using BPMN.

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