Recognizing internationalization as one of the more recently debated topics in the management field, this paper aims at investigating the influence of international R&D teams on companies’ ...innovativeness. More specifically, combining the transaction cost approach, the international product life cycle model, and the eclectic paradigm, an integrative research model with four associated hypotheses is proposed to study international R&D teams. Hypotheses are tested using data collected on a sample of 218 Italian companies with the aim of enriching the ongoing debate about the role of international R&D teams in sustaining companies’ innovativeness. The research shows that the number of international team projects, the number of R&D employees from foreign countries, and the number of meetings during the year for international knowledge sharing positively influence companies’ innovative outcomes. Accordingly, results emphasize the central role of knowledge contamination and collaboration for promoting companies’ innovation.
The lifetime of man-made materials is controlled largely by the wear and tear of everyday use, environmental stress and unexpected damage, which ultimately lead to failure and disposal. Smart ...materials that mimic the ability of living systems to autonomously protect, report, heal and even regenerate in response to damage could increase the lifetime, safety and sustainability of many manufactured items. There are several approaches to achieving these functions using polymer-based materials, but making them work in highly variable, real-world situations is proving challenging.
We examine the impact of digital transformation (DT) on performance using a sample of Chinese firms. Leveraging the recent advances in textual analysis and a manual reading of annual reports, we ...quantify whether a firm has DT and the extent of its DT. The results show that DT enhances a firm's performance. In addition, we document that when a firm has DT, it has lower cost, better operating efficiency, and better innovation success leading to better performance. After decomposing the DT into normal and excess DT, we document that the normal DT helps a firm's performance in the longer term while the excess DT can boost a firm's performance in the first two years. Additional analysis suggests that DT is most helpful for firms in the mature stage of their product life cycle.
Nowadays, along with the application of new-generation information technologies in industry and manufacturing, the big data-driven manufacturing era is coming. However, although various big data in ...the entire product lifecycle, including product design, manufacturing, and service, can be obtained, it can be found that the current research on product lifecycle data mainly focuses on physical products rather than virtual models. Besides, due to the lack of convergence between product physical and virtual space, the data in product lifecycle is isolated, fragmented, and stagnant, which is useless for manufacturing enterprises. These problems lead to low level of efficiency, intelligence, sustainability in product design, manufacturing, and service phases. However, physical product data, virtual product data, and connected data that tie physical and virtual product are needed to support product design, manufacturing, and service. Therefore, how to generate and use converged cyber-physical data to better serve product lifecycle, so as to drive product design, manufacturing, and service to be more efficient, smart, and sustainable, is emphasized and investigated based on our previous study on big data in product lifecycle management. In this paper, a new method for product design, manufacturing, and service driven by digital twin is proposed. The detailed application methods and frameworks of digital twin-driven product design, manufacturing, and service are investigated. Furthermore, three cases are given to illustrate the future applications of digital twin in the three phases of a product respectively.
Smart manufacturing Kusiak, Andrew
International journal of production research,
01/2018, Letnik:
56, Številka:
1-2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Manufacturing has evolved and become more automated, computerised and complex. In this paper, the origin, current status and the future developments in manufacturing are disused. Smart manufacturing ...is an emerging form of production integrating manufacturing assets of today and tomorrow with sensors, computing platforms, communication technology, control, simulation, data intensive modelling and predictive engineering. It utilises the concepts of cyber-physical systems spearheaded by the internet of things, cloud computing, service-oriented computing, artificial intelligence and data science. Once implemented, these concepts and technologies would make smart manufacturing the hallmark of the next industrial revolution. The essence of smart manufacturing is captured in six pillars, manufacturing technology and processes, materials, data, predictive engineering, sustainability and resource sharing and networking. Material handling and supply chains have been an integral part of manufacturing. The anticipated developments in material handling and transportation and their integration with manufacturing driven by sustainability, shared services and service quality and are outlined. The future trends in smart manufacturing are captured in ten conjectures ranging from manufacturing digitisation and material-product-process phenomenon to enterprise dichotomy and standardisation.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine when and how organizations build big data analytics capability (BDAC) to improve supply chain agility (SCA) and gain competitive advantage.
...Design/methodology/approach
The authors grounded the theoretical framework in two perspectives: the dynamic capabilities view and contingency theory. To test the research hypotheses, the authors gathered 173 usable responses using a pre-tested questionnaire.
Findings
The results suggest that BDAC has a positive and significant effect on SCA and competitive advantage. Further, the results support the hypothesis that organizational flexibility (OF) has a positive and significant moderation effect on the path joining BDAC and SCA. However, contrary to the belief, the authors found no support for the moderation effect of OF on the path joining BDAC and competitive advantage.
Originality/value
The study makes some useful contributions to the literature on BDAC, SCA, OF, and competitive advantage. Moreover, the results may further motivate future scholars to replicate the findings using longitudinal data.
The very impotent modern industrial problem is to design a family of the mechatronic facilities electronic objects (e-objects). E-objects are an software of description of real mechatronic robotic ...objects being used in the engineering and production of future facilities. E-objects are placed in the cloud and let real mechatronic robotic objects to be described adequately and the properties of intelligent robotic systems (IRS), the properties of the device being manufactured, the properties of engineering and production processes, etc. To project e-objects is a component of the synthesis project problem of the future mechatronic robotic facilities. A family of e-objects, which are adequate for the product life-cycle is shown. The product lifecycle is shown. The place of each e-objects family are defined to realize product life-cycle.
•A big data driven framework of sustainable and smart additive manufacturing is proposed.•Key enabling technologies are designed to implement the framework.•Benefits of the framework were explained ...for additive manufacturing.•An application of AlSi10Mg products is presented by SLM system for validation of SSAM framework.
From the last decade, additive manufacturing (AM) has been evolving speedily and has revealed the great potential for energy-saving and cleaner environmental production due to a reduction in material and resource consumption and other tooling requirements. In this modern era, with the advancements in manufacturing technologies, academia and industry have been given more interest in smart manufacturing for taking benefits for making their production more sustainable and effective. In the present study, the significant techniques of smart manufacturing, sustainable manufacturing, and additive manufacturing are combined to make a unified term of sustainable and smart additive manufacturing (SSAM). The paper aims to develop framework by combining big data analytics, additive manufacturing, and sustainable smart manufacturing technologies which is beneficial to the additive manufacturing enterprises. So, a framework of big data-driven sustainable and smart additive manufacturing (BD-SSAM) is proposed which helped AM industry leaders to make better decisions for the beginning of life (BOL) stage of product life cycle. Finally, an application scenario of the additive manufacturing industry was presented to demonstrate the proposed framework. The proposed framework is implemented on the BOL stage of product lifecycle due to limitation of available resources and for fabrication of AlSi10Mg alloy components by using selective laser melting (SLM) technique of AM. The results indicate that energy consumption and quality of the product are adequately controlled which is helpful for smart sustainable manufacturing, emission reduction, and cleaner production.