In the plant engineering and manufacturing industry, the main products are large plants or plant components, e. g. paintshops for the automotive industry. The products are developed and built for the needs and specifications of a particular customer or customer group. They can be regarded as custom-built products – involving complementary process technology and know-how which are very different to the ones common for mass-produced or mass-marketed products.
The mentioned industry is characterized by a high complexity of the products and a multitude of component changes in the order process resulting in a high planning and coordination effort.
These aspects have a direct or indirect impact on the shape of the innovation processes and innovation management methods to be used.
Research articles on this topic seem to be rare --> any hints on good literature welcome!
I have my own perspective on this, check it out at the link below!
Conference Paper Stimulating innovation and guiding research & development in...
It is not entirely surprising that there are hardly any articles that explicitly focus on plant engineering and manufacturing. The way you describe it - and also the way I know it - the output are, in principle, complex product systems. There's a lot of literature on complex product systems (CoPs) which might interest you (see for instance http://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&q=complex+product+systems&btnG=&lr=). Besides, the coordination mechanism that you highlight is very similar to the kind of user-producer interaction that Eric von Hippel put forward in his books. In my opinion, it may be quite fruitful to attempt to synthesise these existing perspectives and then push the frontier therefrom.
Thank you for your valuable input. It seems I wasn't aware of the right category to search in.
Viele Grüße to Jena!
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Statistics
- Survey