A Method for Impact Analysis of Cyclic Changes within Innovation Processes of PSS

Innovation processes are subject to various internal and external cycles. Changes of the environment of the system from a business perspective such as the readiness of new technologies or shifting requirements due to changing customer demands, or other cycles can affect the system as they significantly influence its innovation process. Especially companies providing PSS are affected by these cycles because physical product and service aspects as well as a high number of stakeholders have to be integrated during the design and development phase. While in conventional development processes dynamics caused by the occurrence of cycles already play a major role, the influence of dynamic aspects in the development of PSS is further enhanced. In particular, the high degree of crosslinking between the different phases of the innovation process leads to highly dynamic responses within the innovation process. A lack of knowledge and the challenging handling of these cycles and their dependencies and effects lead to challenges. In highly dynamic systems, the classical approaches of process modelling often reach their limits, as the depicted elements and relations are usually assumed to be static. Consequently, it is hard to predict the dynamic impact of cyclic changes on the innovation process of PSS. There are approaches to model the dynamics of systems such as System Dynamics, agent-based modelling or discrete event simulation. Especially System Dynamics is used throughout the public and private sector for policy analysis and design. It is a method to analyse and simulate the dynamic behaviour of systems on a high level of abstraction. Therefore, within this paper, a System Dynamics based impact analysis of cyclic changes within innovation processes of PSS is suggested. We provide background information on the innovation process of PSS, how they are challenged by cycles and how this approach can be used for modelling innovation processes and on the influence of cycles on these processes. An exemplary case study is presented to show the application of our approach on an innovation process of a PSS. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V.