Begrippen Digitalization & Innovation

Creativity: The process of generating new concepts and ideas that can later be transformed into products, services or solutions. It can be developed and managed rather than being purely innate.
Divergent thinking: Exploring multiple possible solutions to a problem instead of converging on one answer. It is one of the abilities of highly creative thinkers.
Incubation: Second stage in Wallas' model: temporarily stepping away from the problem while the subconscious keeps processing information.
Knowledge-enabling control: Knowing which goals to achieve, which resources are available and which conditions affect success. One of the three types of knowledge linked to creativity, next to expert knowledge and knowledge of methods.
Groupthink: The tendency of a group to converge on one view without critical evaluation. Diverse groups reduce this risk.
Cognitive conflict: Conflict about viewpoints and ideas. In moderate amounts it is beneficial because it stimulates discussion and innovation, unlike affective conflict.
Affective conflict: Personal and emotional disagreements within a group. Usually harmful to creativity and collaboration.
Process conflict: Disagreement about how the work should be done. Can reduce efficiency when excessive.
Empathy map: Tool that helps a team understand what users think, feel and need, encouraging a customer-centered perspective.
Customer journey map: Maps the customer's experience across different stages to identify problems, opportunities, needs and emotions.
Personas: Fictional representations of target users based on research, used to design products and services around user needs.
W-Cascade: Goal-setting and planning tool that breaks large goals into smaller objectives and clarifies how they can be achieved.
Analogical thinking: Finding similarities between unrelated situations, concepts or objects to transfer solutions from one context to another.
Production blocking: Brainstorming problem in which people forget or lose ideas while waiting for their turn to speak.
Free-riding: Some participants contribute less because they rely on the group. A limitation of brainstorming that NGT reduces.
Social inhibition: Hesitation to share ideas in front of others. NGT reduces it through individual, silent idea generation.
Group Decision Support System (GDSS): Digital system that collects, displays and categorizes ideas electronically, allows anonymous participation and supports distributed groups.
Trap of creativity: Teams focus on generating ideas and forget implementation, so resources are spent and valuable ideas never reach the market.
Innovation funnel: View of innovation in which many ideas enter, are screened and developed, and only a few are commercialized.
Concept: A structured version of an idea that describes customer benefits, key features and required technology. At least two of benefit, form and technology must be clear.
Sensitivity analysis: Testing whether the outcome of concept selection changes under different assumptions, such as other weights or scores.
Point of no return: The reflection and reality check at the end of concept selection, after which significant investments follow.
Operations management: Managing the transformation of inputs into outputs to improve efficiency, reduce costs, increase customer value and create competitive advantage.
Process innovation: Improving or redesigning production or service processes through new procedures, technologies or systems.
Concurrent engineering: Departments collaborate simultaneously rather than sequentially during development, leading to faster development and fewer costly design errors.
Reverse engineering: Analyzing an existing product by disassembling it and studying its components to understand how it works and recreate designs.
Rapid Product Development (RPD): Shortening development time through digital models, quick modifications and fast prototyping; supported by reverse engineering.
Job shop: Production in small batches of customized products with flexible workflows and skilled labor.
Flow shop: Production of large volumes of standardized products in sequential, highly efficient and repetitive processes.
Stretch: Continuing innovation after major investments have been made, such as learning effects and incremental optimization after a factory is built.
Application development: Adapting products to specific customer needs, which creates extra value and strengthens long-term customer relationships.
Gap analysis: Comparing customer expectations with experiences, management with customer perceptions, and desired with actual performance to find quality gaps.
Quality circles: Small groups of employees that meet regularly to discuss operational problems, find causes of quality issues and propose improvements.
Just-in-Time (JIT): Production philosophy aimed at eliminating waste by producing only what is needed, when it is needed, in the required quantity.
Business Process Re-engineering (BPR): Radical redesign of business processes from scratch to achieve dramatic improvements in cost, quality, speed, service and efficiency.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP): The simplest version of a product that still delivers customer value, used to test with customers and learn early.
Servitization: Manufacturers moving from selling products to selling services, with customers paying for usage rather than ownership.
Internet of Things (IoT): Connecting machines, products and systems through data networks, enabling real-time monitoring and continuous data analysis.
Industry 4.0: The digital transformation of manufacturing through connected and smart technologies, also called the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Originality: A trait of creative individuals: thinking outside conventional patterns and producing unusual ideas. It is one of the seven traits from the lecture, next to sensitivity, fluency, flexibility, penetration, elaboration and redefinition, and can be strengthened through practice.
Fluency: A trait of creative individuals: the ability to generate many ideas and associations. Fluency is about the quantity of ideas, which links to the brainstorming rule 'go for quantity' and to raising the number of ideas n in the innovation simulation.
Flexibility: A trait of creative individuals: adapting existing knowledge to new situations. A flexible thinker can apply what they know in a different context, which relates to analogical thinking: transferring ideas from one context to another.
Three schools of creativity: Three views on where creativity comes from: as an individual process (Wallas, 1926, four stages inside one person), as a group activity (Osborn, people build on each other's ideas, which led to brainstorming) and as a social process (Amabile, shaped by the individual and the social environment).
Wallas' four stages of the creative process: Wallas (1926) describes creativity inside the individual in four stages: preparation (define and study the problem), incubation (step away while the subconscious keeps working), illumination (the eureka moment) and verification (test and refine). The process is iterative: if verification fails, the cycle starts again.
Creativity as a social process: Amabile's view that a creative idea must be new, useful, relevant to the problem and recognized as valuable by knowledgeable people. Because experts in the field have to acknowledge the value, creativity depends on the social environment and not only on the individual.
Componential Theory of Creativity: Amabile's theory that creativity depends on four interacting components: domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant skills, task motivation and the social environment. Creativity is highest when all four are present, so an expert without intrinsic motivation or in a punishing environment still produces few creative ideas.
Task motivation: The third component of Amabile's Componential Theory: intrinsic motivation, curiosity and personal interest in the task. Without it, even an expert with deep domain knowledge produces few creative ideas, as the lecture's practical implication shows.
Time pressure: Listed in the lecture as a factor that reduces creativity, together with harsh criticism, organizational politics, focus on the status quo, conservative management and excessive multitasking. People need room to explore, incubate and experiment, which high time pressure takes away.
Role of management in creativity: Managers stimulate creativity by encouraging open communication, supporting cross-functional collaboration, increasing employee autonomy, creating inclusive and diverse teams and providing resources and time for idea development. This links to the social environment component of Amabile's theory.
Cross-functional collaboration: Collaboration between people from different functions or departments. Managers can support it to foster creativity: bringing in people from other functions adds new knowledge and perspectives, for example in a product team with deep expertise that produces few new ideas.
Organic structure: A flexible organizational structure that creativity tends to push organizations toward, because creative employees need freedom and collaboration. Its opposite, a rigid hierarchical structure with tight control, fits badly with a creative workforce.
Diverse groups: Groups whose members differ in background and perspective. They offer three benefits for creativity: a reduced risk of groupthink, a greater variety of perspectives and more innovative solutions. They also raise the risk of affective conflict if they are not managed well.
Psychological safety: A climate in which people feel safe to voice different viewpoints without fear of harsh criticism. It enables healthy cognitive conflict, and many creativity techniques use explicit rules, such as withholding criticism in brainstorming, to create it and keep conflict constructive.
Systematic-analytical techniques: One of the two broad categories of creativity techniques: techniques that use structured analysis to find opportunities and solutions. Examples are the Design Thinking Canvas, the customer journey map, the empathy map, personas and the W-Cascade.
Associative and imaginative techniques: The second broad category of creativity techniques: techniques that rely on associations, analogies and imagination rather than structured analysis. Examples are analogical thinking, the excursion method and brainstorming.
Design Thinking Canvas: A visual systematic-analytical tool that structures problem-solving and organizes ideas. It is used to support analysis and to communicate the problem and possible solutions within a team.
Excursion method: A technique that deliberately takes people away from the problem environment. It has four steps: excursion (imagine or experience an unrelated setting), review (reflect on observations), create analogies (link insights to the original problem) and evaluation (discuss and combine ideas). Its success depends heavily on imagination.
Brainstorming: A group technique by Osborn (1957) for generating many ideas in a short time. A session has a divergence stage (as many ideas as possible) and a convergence stage (organize, evaluate, select). It is most useful for problem definition and idea generation, less for implementation and evaluation.
Four rules of brainstorming: The core rules of Osborn's brainstorming: withhold criticism during idea generation (creates psychological safety), welcome wild ideas, go for quantity, and combine and improve each other's ideas. Postponing evaluation until idea generation is complete is a key success factor.
Nominal Group Technique (NGT): A structured alternative to brainstorming in which participants first generate ideas individually and interaction is limited. It reduces social inhibition, free-riding and production blocking. It needs 5 to 9 participants, around 4 hours and a skilled facilitator, and is best when ideas also need to be prioritized.
Stages of NGT: The five stages of the Nominal Group Technique: introduction, individual idea generation (silently writing ideas), sharing ideas (recorded without discussion), clarification and consolidation (discussing and combining similar ideas, no criticism yet) and ranking (voting, after which the top ideas become priorities).
Parallel idea generation: An advantage of a Group Decision Support System: all participants enter ideas electronically at the same time instead of waiting for their turn. This removes production blocking, and combined with anonymous input it makes discussing sensitive topics easier.
Walt Disney Method: A creativity technique in which the team moves sequentially through three perspectives, possibly repeating the cycle: the Dreamer, the Realist and the Critic. It breaks thinking patterns and combines creativity with feasibility, but it is time-consuming, requires participants to fully adopt the roles and does not guarantee a final solution.
Dreamer, Realist and Critic: The three roles of the Walt Disney Method. The Dreamer generates ideas freely without criticism or limits; the Realist examines how ideas can be implemented (resources, feasibility, execution); the Critic evaluates weaknesses and risks and tests whether the idea is truly valuable.
Method 635: A structured written brainstorming technique: 6 participants each write 3 ideas, and every 5 minutes the sheets pass to the next participant, who improves and expands them. It quickly yields many ideas without criticism, but carries a risk of copying instead of creating and of relying on others' ideas.
AI and creativity: AI can support both phases of idea generation: in divergence it generates many alternatives and explores possibilities, in convergence it organizes ideas, evaluates options and supports decisions. It can act as an individual assistant, a team participant or a facilitator.
Commercialization: The last stage of the innovation funnel, after the early stage, screening and development: bringing the innovation to the market. Only a few of the many initial ideas reach this stage, which is why the funnel focuses resources on the most promising opportunities.
Three dimensions of a concept: A concept has three dimensions: benefit (the value for the customer), form (what the solution looks like) and technology (how it works). Generally at least two of the three must be clear for a concept to be feasible; an idea with only a known benefit, such as 'customers want faster delivery', is not yet a concept.
Concept screening: Evaluating concepts before investing resources, in order to compare alternatives objectively, reduce risk and prioritize the concepts with the highest potential. Common methods are checklists, expert opinions, group voting and scoring models. It makes the screening step of the innovation funnel concrete.
Scoring model: A screening method that evaluates concepts against predefined, weighted criteria. Typical criteria are strategic fit, customer fit, market attractiveness, technical feasibility and financial potential (profit and a realistic path to break-even).
Strategic fit: A criterion in a scoring model: whether a concept aligns with the company strategy and its technological priorities. In the lecture's worked example it carries the highest weight (0.5), next to customer fit (0.3) and technical feasibility (0.2).
Concept selection process: Six steps: define selection criteria (with weights and a scoring matrix), rate alternatives, rank alternatives on weighted scores, combine and improve concepts, select the best concept(s) with a sensitivity analysis, and a reflection and reality check. Step 6 is often seen as the point of no return.
Weighted score: The total score of a concept in a scoring model: the sum over all criteria of the criterion weight times the score on that criterion. The concept with the highest total ranks first, but the ranking can change when weights change, which is why a sensitivity analysis follows.
Reflection and reality check: The last step of concept selection: revisiting rejected concepts, checking for overlooked criteria, looking for evaluation errors or biases and confirming that the chosen concept is genuinely superior. It guards against personal bias, inconsistent scoring, group influence and overconfidence.
Inputs to operations design: Besides the usual inputs, operations managers must consider three additional factors: the customer (who often participates directly, especially in services), information (customer feedback, market research, regulations and standards) and the business environment (competitors, regulations, physical and economic conditions).
Balancing competing requirements: Design means trading off requirements that work against each other: making a bicycle frame stronger may also make it heavier. The design process starts and ends with customer needs, which marketing translates into product specifications.
Three elements of product design: A product design consists of the concept (the benefit customers expect to receive), the package (the combination of product features that delivers that benefit) and the process (the activities and operations needed to produce and deliver the product or service).
Craft production: Low-volume production with highly skilled labor and flexible methods. It is used in industries such as fashion: high customization, small runs and fast response to changing trends. As volume rises, processes become more efficient and capital-intensive but less flexible.
Design simplification: Reducing the complexity of a design. It leads to easier production, lower costs, fewer defects, simpler purchasing and inventory management, and faster quality control.
Process design: How production or service activities are organized. It depends on the technology used, the product characteristics and the required volume. A key aspect is the layout, which determines material flow, visibility of processes and efficiency and differs per product and industry.
Four elements of process design: Network design (where activities are located and how sites connect), layout and flow (how materials, information and customers move), process technology (automation level, speed, flexibility) and job design (roles, skills, autonomy). They are interdependent: more automation, for example, changes the skills and roles needed.
Network design: The element of process design that determines where activities are located and how sites and facilities are connected to each other. Because the four elements are interdependent, a change in the network often requires changes in layout, technology and job design.
Job design: The element of process design that determines employee roles, required skills, degree of autonomy and coordination between workers. It must be aligned with technology and workflow, because process innovation needs attention to both technical and human factors.
Incremental process innovation: Process innovation that improves existing operations, with a focus on efficiency, quality and cost reduction. In process industries with very large volumes, such small improvements can generate substantial financial benefits.
Radical process innovation: Process innovation that completely redesigns production systems. It often accompanies new factories, new technologies or new business models. Like all process innovation it is less visible than product innovation and therefore often gets less attention.
Process industries: Industries such as food processing, chemicals and packaging, with high production speed, short throughput times, rigid process control, high capital investment, limited flexibility and standardized, simple products. Process innovation is often their main source of competitive advantage and requires close coordination between manufacturing, engineering and R&D.
Abernathy and Utterback model: A model of how innovation shifts over the life of an industry. In the early stage product innovation dominates as firms experiment with designs; in the growth stage designs stabilize and process innovation gains importance; in the mature stage process innovation dominates with a focus on cost and efficiency. It reflects a move from exploration to exploitation.
Process improvement teams: An extension of quality circles, focused on continuous improvement, cost reduction and process innovation. Like quality circles they use the knowledge of employees closest to the process, and they can generate significant improvements and even new innovations.
Total Quality Management (TQM): A company-wide approach to continuously improving quality. Principles: customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal, quality is everyone's responsibility, costs of poor quality are measured and reduced, products are designed correctly from the start and continuous improvement is part of the culture. TQM does not replace leadership when innovation meets resistance.
Continuous improvement: Making small, ongoing improvements to existing processes over time. A key insight of TQM is that such improvements can often create more value than occasional radical innovations. It contrasts with Business Process Re-engineering, which starts from a clean sheet.
Quality Function Deployment (QFD): A development method that translates customer requirements into product and process specifications. It helps to understand customer needs, connect them to design decisions, involve operations early and improve coordination between departments. It is useful for complex products but can be resource-intensive.
ISO 9000: An international, certifiable quality management standard that ensures organizations have consistent and documented quality management systems. Its four key principles are customer focus, measurement of quality performance, continuous improvement and top management commitment. Certification shows consistent processes, not superior products.
EFQM Excellence Model: The model of the European Foundation for Quality Management for evaluating organizational excellence. Its main idea is that excellent results come from strong organizational enablers. It encourages self-assessment, supports continuous improvement and integrates innovation and learning into organizational performance.
Enablers and results: The two sides of the EFQM model. Enablers are what the organization does: leadership, strategy, people, partnerships and resources, and processes. Results are what it achieves for customers, employees, society and business performance. Strong enablers lead to positive results.
Supply Chain Management (SCM): The coordination of activities across suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and customers, aimed at delivering customer value, reducing costs, improving responsiveness and coordinating information and material flows. Success depends on trust, information sharing, coordination mechanisms and strong relationships.
Supplier involvement in innovation: Because firms increasingly focus on core activities and outsource support activities, suppliers become strategically important and are often sources of innovation. Involving them leads to better designs, lower development costs, faster innovation and access to specialized expertise.
Disruptive innovation: Christensen's argument that successful companies often fail because they focus too heavily on existing customers and technologies. New technologies initially appear inferior but improve over time and eventually disrupt established firms that optimized existing products instead of exploring new opportunities.
Lean innovation: The application of lean manufacturing principles to innovation and product development, with the core principle of maximizing customer value while minimizing waste. Firms build quickly, test early, learn from customers and adapt continuously. It is primarily a learning system that reveals what customers value before major investments.
Lean innovation process: Four steps: identify the Minimum Viable Product (the simplest version that delivers customer value), test it with customers in real-world conditions, learn and adapt by improving, modifying or pivoting, and repeat until a competitive solution emerges. Benefits include faster learning, lower development costs and reduced market risk.
Lean principles: The five principles of lean thinking, formulated by Womack and Jones (Lean Thinking, 1996) and listed in the lecture under Eric Ries and lean startup: identify customer value from the customer's perspective, map the value stream and remove waste, create flow so value moves efficiently, establish pull by developing based on actual customer demand, and seek perfection through continuous improvement.
Value stream: All activities that together deliver value to the customer. Mapping the value stream is the second lean principle: it makes visible which activities add value so that waste can be identified and removed.
Smart technologies: Key components of Industry 4.0 with four characteristics: awareness (sensors monitor products and their environment), intelligence (algorithms support autonomous decisions and learning), connectivity (devices communicate through M2M networks) and responsiveness (systems adapt automatically to changing conditions).
Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication: Devices communicating with each other through machine-to-machine networks: the connectivity characteristic of smart technologies. Together with the IoT, which connects machines, products and systems through data networks, it lets firms monitor operations in real time and collect operational data continuously.
Innovation as a statistical process: The main lesson of the innovation simulation: innovation management cannot guarantee success but raises the probability of it. Because only the best idea needs to succeed, performance improves with more ideas (n), greater diversity (sigma) and a higher average idea quality (mu).
Idea diversity (sigma): The spread in quality of a set of ideas. A wider spread gives a wider range of solutions, including extremely good ones, so the best idea in the set is likely better. Diverse teams raise sigma, while brainstorming's 'go for quantity' raises n and domain expertise raises the average mu.
Open innovation: Innovation that happens through networks, communities, ecosystems and collaborative platforms instead of only inside the firm. Digital technologies expanded it by lowering barriers to participation, enabling collaboration across networks, supporting crowdsourcing and increasing access to knowledge.
Innovation modes: The different ways a firm can innovate: internal R&D, open innovation, crowdsourcing, partnerships and communities. Each mode has different costs and benefits, and the choice is influenced by context such as customers, partners, organizational structure, incentives and leadership.