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This paper presents and evaluates a role-play simulation called ‘Theatrical Technology Assessment’, in which students learn about complex stakeholder dynamics around emerging technologies. This role-play combines insights from Constructive Technology Assessment, improvisational theatre and educational role-play designs. It was implemented in an online setting with bachelor students of an interdisciplinary engineering programme. Based on collected chat conversations and reflection reports in seven different simulations, we qualitatively analysed what students learned about stakeholder dynamics. The study shows that students gained novel and relevant insights regarding stakeholder perspectives on technologies, the effects of uncertainties on decision making, collective stakeholder dynamics, and strategies to steer technology development. Students considered the role-play simulations to be engaging learning experiences. The dual set-up of the role-play, with students as players and co-designers, and the integral use of improvisational theatre are novel elements of educational role-play designs.

De infrasector werkt al decennialang als een typische projectindustrie, waarbij samenwerking tussen publieke opdrachtgevers en marktpartijen is georganiseerd rondom de realisatie van opdrachten in unieke projecten. Steeds vaker blijkt het projectmatig werken een belemmering te zijn voor het adresseren van maatschappelijke doelstellingen en uitdagingen zoals een Circulaire Economie en klimaatverandering. De complexiteit van deze opgaven kan simpelweg niet binnen één project ingelost worden. Daardoor is het erg lastig om binnen individuele projecten innovaties op te schalen, waardoor een significante verandering in (duurzamere) producten en processen blijft steken in enkelvoudige experimenten en pilots. Deze uitdagingen vragen om vormen van samenwerkingen tussen verschillende partijen die niet stoppen bij de oplevering van een project. Voor de infrasector betekent dit een verschuiving naar een projectoverstijgend niveau, waarbij relaties en activiteiten zodanig worden georganiseerd dat deze in harmonie komen met de maatschappelijke opgaven. Het innovatie-ecosysteemperspectief heeft zich in verschillende sectoren bewezen als een manier om onderlinge relaties rondom een lange-termijn (innovatie)doel te organiseren. Het ecosysteembegrip wordt al vaak als een modewoord gebruikt, maar wat betekent het concreet? En hoe kan het de infrasector helpen bij deze uitdagingen? In deze studie onderzoeken we hoe het innovatie-ecosysteemdenken in de infrasector een rol kan spelen om de tijdelijke samenwerkingsrelaties die kenmerkend zijn voor de sector naar een projectoverstijgend niveau te tillen.

Challenge-based learning (CBL) seeks to help students acquire skills necessary for collaborative real-world problem solving. It generally favours self-learning, in which students should seek out their own role in a problem-solving environment and choose their own set of skills to develop which are relevant to the challenge. However students from traditional degree programmes may enter with an expectation that their disciplinary expertise will count and be valued in the context of a project, but face a situation that the problem chosen by a group or the dynamics of a group render their expertise less relevant. In survey-based studies of two CBL modules, we explore the relationship between the roles students play and their levels of motivation. We find no evidence that the lack of a disciplinary role strongly affects student motivation. Rather the data suggests that if a CBL environment is properly framed around selfdevelopment and multiple potential learning goals students can relax any commitments or expectations related to their expertise, and take on different roles. This is good news for the CBL aims and goals. That said students do have a tendency to revert to disciplinary roles over the course of projects and are against their disciplinary roles being excluded when they are clearly relevant. Instructors can potentially avoid problems by having students evaluate their role choices against desired project outcomes.

Project and challenge-based learning typically require students to navigate personal and professional relationships within a team, in order to collaboratively solve authentic problems. These collaborations are often interdisciplinary in nature – an arrangement that adds increased complexity to the team’s functioning. This is due to distinctions in approaches, epistemologies, ethos or jargon. The ability to provide (and receive) appropriate and constructive feedback to peers, within the team, is a key skill that can enhance team functioning and ultimately, output. Furthermore, it is a competence that aids in lubricating social and work impediments that may be causing bottlenecks to creativity, or the manifestation of ideas. The aim of this study, set within three different interdisciplinary bachelor modules, is to determine to what extent the use of the ‘Buddycheck’ application for peer review, is appreciated by students and teachers. The application, hosted within the learning management system of the university, allows students to rank their peers’ performance according to teacher-set criteria, as well as through flexible open-format feedback; in order to facilitate opportunities for enhanced communication and expectation alignment. We wish to ascertain to what degree team functioning is enhanced through the scaffolded communication opportunities, by highlighting and creating openings to discuss undesirable behaviours, through the feedback application. Preliminary results appear to favour this mode of feedback facilitation, albeit with certain caveats, detailed later. Since teamwork is universal in tertiary education, these insights may be helpful for educators attempting to further improve the evaluation of the process of their projects or challenges.

Dutch summary of the scientific publication: "A systemic perspective on transition barriers to a circular infrastructure sector"

Interdisciplinary project-based learning facilitates the development of a range of skills and knowledge through autonomous learning or an experiential educational structure. The ability to cooperate across disciplinary boundaries within a team environment is an inextricable component, and supporting the necessarily skills for doing so, via the deliberate development professional skills-training, is arguably crucial. As tutors may lack time or expertise to extensively scaffold interdisciplinary teamwork, the question is whether a minimally guided student-driven learning context in which students are left to decide on which professional skills to develop, can be effective, given the collaborative challenges students face. For this study, a trial was implemented to ascertain whether students would recognise the importance of and engage with, resources designed to foster professional skills in a collaborative interdisciplinary context. A variety of student-driven resources were implemented with varying degrees of success. Students were encouraged to use a team contract with the aim to delineate expectations and pre-empt strife. Professional skill resources on topics such as communication and conflict management were offered in order to enhance self-reflection and self-development. There was some indication that team contracts offer a safe condition to set expectations, but there was low interest in the student-driven courses aimed at professional skills. The results suggest autonomous modes of learning may not be appropriate for the development of such skills. The ability to motivate students to adopt the student-driven approach as well as prioritise time in their busy schedules, remains elusive. Details on the rationale of resources as well as recommendations for use are offered.

The construction industry is increasingly facing societal challenges, such as climate change, resource scarcity, and digitalization. Traditional ways of organizing construction appear to be unsuitable for coping with these challenges. This calls for more systemic solutions in construction that reach beyond single projects or sectors to transform to a more resilient society. In this research, the innovation ecosystem perspective is explored to open up new horizons for dealing with the challenges. The innovation ecosystem can be understood as a multi-stakeholder network around certain innovative value propositions. Several theoretical innovation ecosystems characteristics are applied to the construction context by means of two illustrative cases from the Dutch construction sector. Results indicate that the innovation ecosystem perspective has the potential to both deal with the challenges involved and foster the innovativeness required for transitioning the sector. Benefits include the consideration of actors that are outside the construction domain, such as organizations for data management in the context of the circular economy, as well the long-term relation building among interdependent actors. However, additional case study research is needed to explore the full potential of its application in construction.

To be able to contribute to societal challenges, engineering students need to learn how to interact with societal stakeholders and incorporate their viewpoints in technology development. This proves to be difficult, especially when it concerns newly emerging technologies, which are characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity. This paper presents a novel educational method - Theatrical Technology Assessment - which combines insights from Constructive Technology Assessment and improvisational theater in a role-play simulation that enables engineering students to explore the socio-technical dynamics and alternative futures of emerging technologies. This method is tested with bachelor students at the University of Twente. Students were involved as players of the role-play simulation, but also as co-designers and role-instructors. The pilot study corroborates that a role-play simulation is a powerful means for students to learn about the complexity of societal interactions around emerging technologies. They learn about differences in stakeholder perspectives and ways to anticipate or transcend these, and about general patterns in socio-technical dynamics.

There is a growing interest in innovation ecosystems from academia and practice. Embedding innovation processes in these ecosystems comes with several opportunities and managerial challenges. The aim of this paper is to increase our understanding of the strategies managers of industrial firms use to deal with innovation ecosystems. How do they align partners and activities, while securing their role in the innovation ecosystem? In addition, we aim to further develop the concept of innovation ecosystems by embedding it in the broader literature on innovation systems. We draw on a large set of interviews with innovation managers in Germany and the Netherlands. Based on our study, we identify two layers of innovation ecosystems. One is a more open, explorative layer aimed at exploring new technologies and articulating opportunities, another is a more closed, exploitative layer aimed at enacting these opportunities and technologies. Between the layers, synergies and tensions exist. Companies have developed strategies to deal with both layers, in particular related to alignment and strategic positioning.

Climate services bear the promise of becoming a new, remunerative market of knowledge-intensive services. Managers, engineers and policy makers need to cope with the consequences and risks of climate change, and these services aim to improve their decision making. There have been experiments with climate services, but so far, there has been little reflection on the kinds of services such a new market could encompass, and the ways in which sustainable business models can be created. This research note presents a typology with four scenarios for climate service development. These are part of a Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA) exercise, in which scenarios are discussed by a heterogeneous group of users, producers and other stakeholders to explore value propositions of potential services from different angles. Thus, CTA provides a basis for business model development in this emerging field.

Societal challenges – such as climate change, sustainable production and consumption, demographic change, healthcare (European Commission 2017), and the ongoing digitization – lead companies more often to think about topics and technologies beyond their established research and innovation practices. These challenges not only require societal responsibility to tackle them, but also offer a high potential for transformative innovation. In order to develop such future perspectives and to unlock their potential for innovation, companies need to forsake established innovation routines. Cooperation beyond well-known innovation and value chain partners is required to anticipate and keep up with societal challenges and emerging technological opportunities and to develop transformative ideas and concepts.

Machine learning techniques show a great promise for improving innovation portfolio management. In this paper we experiment with different methods to classify innovation projects of a high-tech firm as either explorative or exploitative, and compare the results with a manual, theory-based mapping of these projects and with expert classification. We find that by combining a high-information extraction method with a decision tree or maximum entropy algorithm, higher levels of accuracy can be reached. Opportunities and limitations of different methods are discussed.

Many scholars have stressed the need for balancing exploitation with sufficient levels of exploration (Levinthal and March, 1993; March, 1991, 2006). Organizations that have a one-sided focus on exploitation by allocating resources to refinement of existing technologies rather than to developing new skills and capabilities, achieve immediate success at the future risk of becoming obsolete (Holmqvist, 2004; Leonard-Barton, 1992). For growing companies, maintaining sufficient levels of exploration is challenging. Investing in exploration competes with investing in exploitation, of which the outcomes are more secure and less remote in time (March, 1991). When organizations grow, they tend to skew to efficiency and develop core capabilities for exploitation of current success (Sørensen and Stuart, 2000). These establishing mindsets, expertise and routines are different from those required for exploration (Gupta et al., 2006). The more they become embedded, the more challenging it becomes to transition the organization toward revival of exploration. Balancing exploration and exploitation in time by oscillating back and forth between periods of exploration and exploitation – often referred to as sequential ambidexterity – may be a viable option for small and medium sized organizations that lack resources to pursue simultaneous ambidexterity. Few studies, however, have shown how organisations successfully sequence changes in organizational structures (O'Reilly and Tushman, 2013). It remains unclear how sequential ambidexterity occurs and what the transitions look like. What does it require to shift from exploitation to exploration, or the vice versa? Research in this domain is not fine-gained enough to provide much insight. Although previous studies have provided valuable insights into the antecedents of explorative and exploitative innovation in organizations, only few have unravelled the process of how these factors change exploration levels in growing organizations over time. Since the time dimension is mostly absent in existing studies (Gibson and Birkinshaw, 2004; Jansen et al., 2005) and only partial relationships are illuminated (Eisenhardt, 2010), it remains unclear how structural and individual antecedents in growing organizations interrelate and how they affect exploration decline and recovery. The purpose of this paper is to provide in-depth insights into the dynamics of a growing organization’s exploration and exploitation levels. By adopting an organizational learning perspective, we demonstrate how structural and individual factors change an organization’s exploration and exploitation over time. In order to do so, we conduct a study in a fast growing research and development organization in the wind power industry, providing access to a unique collection of time-accounting data and descriptions of all R&D projects conducted in a timeframe of 100 months. Through text mining these documents, we measure the dynamics of exploration and exploitation levels, visualizing in great detail how a firm goes through transitions from focus on exploration to exploitation and vice versa. Based on a series of interviews with employees of this organization, we demonstrate how structural and individual factors interact and together impact these shifts from exploration to exploitation and

Although prior studies increased our understanding of the performance implications of new product development (NPD) team members’ functional backgrounds and demographic variables, they remained relatively silent on the impact of underlying psychological characteristics such as the team members’ cognitive styles on project performance. The goal of this study is to explore the effects of NPD teams’ cognitive styles on project performance in different kinds of NPD projects. Based on survey data from members of 95 NPD teams gathered in four Dutch manufacturing companies, hypotheses about the relationships between teams’ cognitive styles and project performance of radical and incremental NPD projects are tested. Results of linear regression analyses show that the level of teams’ analytical information processing positively affects project performance in both incremental and radical NPD projects, whereas the relationship between the level of teams’ intuitive information processing and project performance depends on the radicalness of the project. These findings contribute to the academic discussion on team innovation, suggesting that, next to demographic and functional characteristics, cognitive styles in teams also significantly influence project performance.