A Systems Engineering Approach to Systematic Innovation in an Industry-University Collaboration

This paper introduces a disciplined, system-focused approach to systematic innovation and product enhancement. This approach addresses a paradox facing multinational companies that must quickly adapt to new market opportunities and enhance products to sustain market competitiveness but must also assure their products perform as specified with predictable development and support cost. Thus, the engineering process must be able to incorporate innovative concepts that may be high risk while ensuring such concepts translate into product enhancements with low risk. The approach described in this paper is based on a visionary system description that suggests possible enhancements to an existing system. The system is decomposed into subsystem components. Opportunities to enhance each component are explored and each is assessed based on the technical risk of the proposed enhancement. Each risk is then reduced to an acceptable level through a combination of prototyping, experimentation, and/or open innovation methods. The work described is based on a collaboration between thyssenkrupp AG, a multinational company headquartered in Essen (Germany) and its innovation centre at a leading U.S. research university, the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia (USA). This collaboration is an example of how corporations are increasingly seeking strategic university partners to augment their own technical expertise, to search for and acquire new technologies, to influence university research programmes, and to explore potential game changing innovations. The source for the visionary system description in this work is the Industry 4.0 vision for advanced manufacturing as first articulated in Germany. A case study is provided to illustrate the systems-focused innovation approach. Based on the case study, observations are made about lessons learned as well as future areas of research.