Efficiency in Academic and Corporate Research

Ongoing Projects | Completed Projects | How to become a project partner | Archive of students' theses

Ongoing Projects

Completed Projects

How to become a partner in one of our projects?

To become a partner in one of our projects, please contact directly the person indicated on the project of your interest.

The chair of Technology- and Innovation Management of the ETH Zurich engages with the handling of new and established technologies as well as the development of products and services. Our research-results are elaborated to support the companies by using the limited resources well-structured and sustainable to profit from short- and long-term benefit and chances.

As a part of the basic triangle of the chair, research, education and industry, contacts to the industry are always very important. Projects, with and for companies give an actual input into the research activities and influence the education directly.

We work with different companies and develop actual solutions in different profundities, but all the time with absolute confidentiality. With Master and Post-graduate-Diploma Thesis we elaborate together with the companies specific topics for them and the industry as well. During this process, students of the major study at the ETH Zurich join our partner during 12-22 weeks, coached by our institution, guided and supported by the company on specific and well-defined tasks.
In long-term research projects and PhD-thesis, we enable, based on workshops and circles, a big picture as well as details and bring the newest consolidated findings of research and literature into the intersection of practice and theory.

Ongoing Projects

The influence of workspace design on research productivity

Research project

This research analyses how workspace design can influence communication patterns, social network structures, research and development processes, behavior, skills and organizations of researchers, scientists and engineers and thus, their research productivity. The ongoing study investigates employees before and after the relocation to new multi-space office buildings and compares different co-location forms and cross-functional ways of working. The study takes place in a science-driven environment of a multi-national enterprise. The project aims to transfer these research results on smaller and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Please contact Ms. Mareike Heinzen for further information.

Inter-Univiersity Collaborations

PhD thesis

There is some evidence that the next scientific innovation revolution will grow out of the convergence of life sciences with engineering and experimental medicine. Bench- and bedside will be interconnected far tighter. The progress made in the labs of electrical and mechanical engineers and material scientists in the development of advanced diagnostics tools and biomechanical devices shall be made directly available to patients.

In this project, the pre-requisites to enable collaborations on the level of principal investigators in the triangle of medicine, science and engineering shall be explored from a management perspective. Furthermore, funding and resource allocation strategies shall be evaluated in the mentioned field. Major governance challenges are the equilibration of high-risk projects that show the potential for scientific breakthroughs with translational research and low risk projects, as well as the initiation of centers and technology platforms with the avoidance of bureaucracy.

Please contact Mr. Frank Zoller for further information.

Business Models for technological innovation

PhD thesis

The thesis is dedicated to the analysis of business models of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) companies. It aims at fostering the understanding of typical and viable business models of ICT businesses, how business models in the ICT industry evolved, and what an integrated business model innovation approach could look like.

Please contact Mr. Markus Eurich for further information.

Completed Projects

Managing efficiency and innovation in continuous product development

PhD thesis

This thesis analyses the impact of products, processes and people on product development performance. With the two concepts, lean product development (LPD) and continuous product development (CPD) this research shows that by influencing the variables products, processes and people in a particular way, innovativeness and efficiency of product development can be increased at the same time.

The thesis has been published in a book, please click here or contact Ms. Mareike Heinzen for further information.

Technology platforms in universities 

PhD thesis

Inter- and multidisciplinary approaches have become more and more important in academic research. Especially in biomedical sciences, researchers are increasingly dependent on accessing a variety of state-of-the-art research equipment during their research endeavours. Providing scientists with access to that research equipment and to research infrastructure is a growing challenge for universities. Universities are meeting this challenge by establishing technology platforms. Based on qualitative case study research this theses identifies three types of technology platforms at universities: Institute-, department- and institutional technology platforms.

Please contact Mr. S. Andereggen for further information.

Improving inter-organizational knowledge transfer to gain developmnt project success

PhD thesis

Although development alliances promise successful innovations through the exploitation of a partner’s knowledge, the respective transfer of knowledge is challenging. Hence, science and man-agement strive to remove the barriers to inter-organizational knowledge transfer. However, there still is a lot to learn. This thesis strives for new insights into the terms of the improvement of the knowledge transfer activities of development alliances.

Please contact Ms. G. Heyn for further information.

Open innovation and collaboration for innovation 

PhD thesis

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the Open Innovation phenomena by academics and practitioners alike. In particular, an ever growing number of companies view Open Innovation practices as a way to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their innovation processes. Till date, a large number of companies from different industries such as design, consumer goods and the chemical industry have successfully utilized different Open Innovation approaches to enrich their internal innovation processes. However, the shift to Open Innovation and the implementation of Open Innovation practices has generally been difficult for companies around the globe. Despite its immense popularity Open Innovation remains a rather young academic discipline in which academic framework and theories still need to be refined and elaborated on.

Please contact Ms. L. Muhdi for further information.

Diffusion of business-to-government IT innovations: The case of e-customs 

PhD thesis

Business-to-government IT innovations seek to facilitate all procedures and technologies used by business companies and governmental institutions in order to improve their communication and collaboration. This research aims to investigate how e-customs innovation diffusion may take place focusing on the benefits that it can bring to potential stakeholders, i.e., business companies and governments.

Please contact Ms. M. Raus for further information.

Improving efficiency and flexibility in new product development: Extending and testing lean product development concepts 

PhD thesis

In today´s competitive environment, companies in the automotive and production systems industry are facing a major challenge: During product development, companies must be flexible so that they can quickly adapt to changing customer preferences or market conditions while simultaneously utilizing their limited resources in the most efficient manner. This thesis reviews and structures existing literature on lean product development and empirically investigates four specific concepts.

Please contact Mr. Ph. Schmitt for further information.

Technology start-ups 

PhD thesis

Entrepreneurship is considered by policy makers to play an ever increasing role in job creation and industrial renewal. It is therefore not surprising that much focus has been directed toward universities, which could be the source of many new technologies and innovations. Many scholars and practitioners think that technology transfer from universities is most likely to succeed with integrated efforts from universities, industry, and government.

Please contact Mr. A Schicker for further information.

Process Management for Research Organizations

PhD thesis

Increasing productivity in knowledge and research organizations is seen as the biggest management challenge of the 21^st century. To increase efficiency and productivity, process management is regarded as the management method of choice. However, process management as a technique emerged out – and till yet was primarily applied to – mechanistic organization structures. Research and knowledge organizations, however, are typically characterized as organic structures. Thus, it is hypothesized that there is a misfit between process management and research organizations. The goal of this project is to examine if and how process management can be utilized to improve efficiency in research organizations.

Please contact Mr. Sadri Tahar for further information.

Risk Management at Universities

PhD thesis

Universities are exposed to a wide range of different risks, both operative and strategic. Although universities have in many cases officers responsible for safety, e.g. concerning dangers of fire, explosions, health risks or dangers to the environment, this doesn’t cover their full risk exposure and lacks consistency of approach to risks. This goes hand in hand with a paradigmatic shift from trying to eliminate uncertainty through planning and controlling to an acceptance that risks are inherent in universities activities, can be optimized but not eliminated and thus need to be actively and transparently managed. Politicians and society in general are asking for higher transparency, accountability and efficiency. Thus risk management has entered the realm of university policy. This project aims at developing risk management methodologies and processes for the application in a university setting.

Please contact Mr. Cornelius Niemeyer for further information.

CSR related Risks in the Supply Chain

PhD thesis

Globalization offers many opportunities to companies, but also poses novel sources of of uncertainty and risk: risks that have an impact on the reputation of the company are gaining importance. This thesis seeks to examine the extent to which companies use their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs to manage emerging social and reputational risks in the supply chain. The relationship is analysed under the perspective of risk and stakeholder management.

Please contact Mr. Mikko De Nardo for further information.

Purchasing in China

PhD thesis

Asia, eminently China is becoming more and more a powerhouse in manufacturing, especially for high-volume, low-cost production. This will lead to an increasing bigger importance of the Asian markets from the procurement and manufacturing perspective for Swiss companies. Cost pressure and competitiveness are forcing more and more Swiss and European enterprises to dislocate their high-volume production to Asia, where labor rates are extremely low.  For European Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) relocating production to lower-cost countries appears to be attractive in order to maintain price competitiveness. Such a shift poses major challenges regarding intellectual property, flexibility and organization. Our project supports European SMEs implementing a work-sharing between Western Europe, Eastern Europe and South East Asia.

Please contact Ms. Patricia Hurschler for further information.

Design for Maintainability - The maintenance optimal product

PhD thesis

In certain industries preventive maintenance towards its products is the common practice. For example elevators are maintained according to a predetermined servicing schedule or their given trip status. A few years ago the servicing practice of an automobile was similar to that of an elevator. After a certain driven mileage or at least once a year a car usually had to be maintained. Nowadays, the state of the art is to maintain a motorcar according to its condition. So called condition based maintenance (CBM) can be practiced mainly due to sensor technology. Therefore, maintenance measures only take place when a certain deterioration border of a part has been met. Within the elevator industry efforts are under way to be able to move into the direction of CBM (taken from: VDI-Berichte, Aufzüge & Gebäudetechnik 2, 2004).

In this research project we try to identify possible product specific design rules, which lead to a “maintenance optimal” product. We attempt to define organizational structures and processes where maintenance information feedback from the service organizations can be ideally introduced into the new product development processes. The question on what kind of an influence the “maintenance optimal” product has towards the existing maintenance strategy of a company will also be given an answer to.

Please contact Mr. Michael Styger for further information.

Working Circle: Technology Planning

Industrial working circle

Long-term technology planning is necessary in order to reach and maintain competitive advantage in technology based industries. Since building technological competencies is a costly task, companies have to focus on the most promising development activities. On this topic, we are conducting workshops with chief technology officers and members of the technology planning committees of multinational companies, such as ABB Turbo Systems AG, BELIMO Automation AG, DSM Nutritional Products Ltd, Hilti AG, SIG allCap AG, SIG Holding AG and StarragHeckert AG.

Please contact Ms. Karin Löffler for further information.

R&D Productivity in Pharma and Biotech

PhD thesis

The goal of the project is to develop methods facilitating the analysis of productivity in pharmaceutical research. The focus will be the portfolio and group level in order to assess the impact on productivity of new enabling technology platforms and organization models in pharmaceutical and biotech research.

One trend today is to break down large functionally organized research organizations into smaller process driven competence groups for each therapeutic area. Whether this change is influencing the productivity positively or not still has to be measured. It is challenging to measure the impact of restructuring on the productivity of a group since most of the processes are performed in-house without clear start and end point and no clear expenditures.  It is easier to measure the productivity of an outsourcing partner, since the investment is known and the start and end times are defined.

Please contact Mr. Fredrik Ullman for further information.

Intellectual Property Protection in China

PhD thesis

Protection on intellectual assets in China has become a major business challenge. The issue of unauthorized use of intellectual properties in the country necessitates foreign companies to attain a comprehensive understanding IPR laws in China and to build up strategies to protect their intellectual assets. Despite the Chinese government has been putting effort to establish and improve its IPR regulations, the IPR enforcement is weak. Due to this factor, the research project looks at how company should localize its IP protection strategy for China specific. In addition to filling patent, trademark to protect company’s IP, it also investigates for “alternative” protection strategies.

Please contact Ms. Wei-Chi Chen for further information.

Risk Management of Large-Scale Projects

PhD thesis

Risk management of large-scale projects differs considerably from 'normal' projects in a number of issues. Only 15% of all projects are finished successfully by schedule, causing a great loss of money. For example, the project of an internet bank of a big Swiss financial institution was stopped after two years causing an accumulated monetary loss of 256 Mio. Swiss Francs. In addition, human group decision-making is inherently irrational, thus appliance of methodical procedures to deal with these situations is of major importance to prevent irrational and injudicious actions that might evolve as a source of risk. SMEs handling large-scale projects on which their existence may depend are confronted with these problems to even a greater extent. Therefore, it is of high relevance to develop suitable frameworks and tools not only for large firms, but also for SMEs to deal with their project risks especially for major projects with a big impact of the company’s overall performance.

Please contact Mr. Berthold Barodte for further information.

Strategic options in matured, consolidated markets

PhD thesis

The bulk of research in strategic management is focused on large public companies supplying consumer goods. However, privately held mid-sized manufacturers of investment goods work under different, very specific conditions. Can they nevertheless apply the philosophies and methods of mainstream strategic management? Is it sufficient to adopt these methods accordingly or are these companies virtually obliged to develop their own way? Situations occurring in such companies are judged under the light of known philosophies for strategic management in case studies. Due to the selection of companies matching the specific conditions of the research question, templates for approaches are expected to emerge. These templates are reviewed in respect of expectations and interests of the various stakeholders. Characteristics such as path-dependencies, niche strategies, surprising or controversial facts concerning customer/supplier relationship and others are identified and balanced against basic economic rules and general strategic management philosophies.

Please contact Mr. Lukas Weiss for further information.

Innovation in Sports Industry

PhD thesis

In the center of the research project there will be the question, how technical sport innovations can be used for the mass market. In addition, how can the mass market be served, without loss of image or renouncement in product requirements for top-class sportsmen? And the third question will be how an innovative image can exist in a faltering market, which is characterized by monopoly structure on the supplier side and an immense number of different models. Furthermore, how innovation can be created in a market, which is limited by a huge amount of regulations and physical as well as psychical nature given circumstances.
As a result, a concept will be developed, which has to respect the identified characteristic type of sport and integrate the sources of the innovation in the appropriate category. It should explain possibilities how to change these sources in favor of the producing enterprise considering, as mentioned, physical and psychological basic limits and possibilities. The goal is to create an instrument to assist decision-making in the sports industry providing arguments in the clash between cost leadership and differentiation (following Porter). The results should be a bundle of strategic options and new business models (or rather the way to these options and models) and to give an answer, how to manage the situation between the marketing instrument “lead user” and the lead user financing and turnover-delivering mass market.

Please contact Mr. David Müller for further information.

Product Risk Management

PhD thesis

The cost of correcting a product error is rather low during the R&D phase, rises during pre-tests and increases exponentially as its market penetration grows. Each product recall costs an organization, on average, more than $8 million. Key for understanding of why recalls occur at all is product complexity. The complexity of goods has increased significantly in the last years. Today, a growing number of parts is integrated in a single product, and these parts are being delivered by an ever-increasing number of suppliers. These complexities stemming from numerous product parts and supplier interactions are major sources of errors. Technological interdependencies and logistics networks are often so complicated that one person alone is no longer capable of understanding them completely. However, testing of each function and internal interaction of a product's components is possible neither by real testing nor by simulation. Engineers therefore have to integrate backup systems in order to control for potential malfunctions in advance. Ironically, these backup systems themselves further increase the complexity of the goods. Therefore, we need to do research into the topic of product recalls and into suitable strategies how to avoid them. Our research activities in this area aim to provide tools for companies to prevent recalls while still accounting for the product complexity problems we have outlined above.

Please contact Mr. Eric Montagne for further information.

Risk Management in SMEs

PhD thesis

Due to Basel II standards now mandatory across Switzerland, risk management will also become an issue to SMEs especially for these firms' credit rating and access to loans. In addition, Swiss parliament is currently discussing a reorganization of the Swiss auditing law, which would force auditors to check whether an assessment of the relevant business risks was done by the respective company or not. Therefore, banks started developing ingenious rating systems to rate enterprises in different risk levels, determining credit costs directly as a function of the firm's inherent risk: The better the rating, the lower are interest rates on loans. Usually, these sophisticated rating systems for firms' risk are based on quantitative figures from firms' annual reports. Unfortunately, the lender's view on a company's risk structure is rarely identical with the firm's perception. Thus for SMEs it is important to identify and reconcile discrepancies between those viewpoints by research. There will also have to be identified new methods of risk management methods especially for SMEs which often lack funding and time to build up large-scale risk management systems.

Please contact Mr. Adrian Fischer for further information.

Emerging Mobile Service Innovation Markets

PhD thesis

Slow growth of value adding mobile services is the underlying motivation for the study. There is a need to further understand how mobile service innovation markets emerge. Emergence of a market refers to the early phases of a market: to the growth and development phases before the market take-off. The aim of the study is to build a framework of demand and supply factors that affect mobile service markets emergence.

The empirical study is performed as a case study in the emerging Finnish Mobile TV service market. The case study brings insights into the early phases of the Mobile TV service market and how demand and supply factors appear under the case study conditions. The study has interesting managerial implications. Understanding of the demand and supply priorities in the emerging market phase enables managers to focus activities during the innovation process. Those activities support innovation commercialization success and shortening of the innovation’s time to market take-off.

Please contact Ms. Margrit Gläss for further information.

Supply Chain Risk Management

PhD thesis

Supply Chain Management concepts have been often implemented over the past decades. They have in common that companies' production becomes more efficient by reducing stock, time, facilities, equipment and suppliers. However, as redundancies and backups disappeared, they also became more vulnerable and prone to risks. These risks can be classified in three categories. When products demanded for are out of stock, economic and image losses to the firm are the consequence. Producing more products than demanded by the market will result in obsolescence cost and build-up of inefficient repositories. When the firm's supply chain delivers low-quality products, costly recalls or even liability lawsuits may be the consequence.
Therefore, supply chain risk management methods are needed to prevent this new vulnerability from causing economic losses to the firm. We need to do research into suitable structured approaches where risks are identified, assessed and controlled from upstream suppliers through down stream channel partners. We are in the favorable position to do this research directly with industry partners who will test developed concepts and tools for applicability.

Please contact Mr. Hans von Pfuhlstein for further information.

Technology Speed

PhD thesis

Following the common perception, the technological change is faster than ever and is even accelerating. Meanwhile product lifecycles of many products are getting longer. How do these diametrical trends go together?

What strikes at first sight is the immense diversity and number of goods offered. To meet this high variety, companies nowadays realize the bigger part of the product portfolio by using steady platforms and modules, altering just the front end and the combination of modules. In mature industries, this effect is very likely observed because basic functionality is well-defined and remains rather constant over time. In addition, the prizes are very competitive, forcing companies even more to minimize their own costs. A profitable and recognizable differentiation can only be achieved by design.

This research project focuses on the pace of technological progress and its impact on technology-driven companies. Today’s approaches to differentiate between actual technological progress and the bare variation of existing platforms are sophisticated but do not meet the requirements to be applied directly in the daily business of companies. Therefore, the first step is to make sense of the phenomenon “technological change” and to find a broadly accepted definition that fulfils the demands of future research in technology management. In addition, a profound, quantitative base of the trends in speed of technological development is generated an analyzed.  Afterwards the underling technological progress is further analyzed to get a better understanding of crucial events, which lead to a change in the speed of technological developments.

The research hypotheses are tested by analyzing selected industries such as the digital imaging and the hard-drive industry.

Please contact Mr. Nicolas Rohner for further information.

Bottleneck Technologies

PhD thesis

For companies, long-term technology planning is necessary in order to reach and maintain competitive advantage in technology based industries. Since building technological competencies is a costly task, companies have to focus on the most promising development activities. On this topic, we are conducting workshops with chief technology officers and members of the technology planning committees of multinational companies. The intended output of the research is a management approach how to deal with such technologies.

Please contact Ms. Karin Löffler for further information.

Risk and opportunities of sourcing in low-cost countries

Industry inquiry

75 Swiss companies were asked about their motivations to source in low-cost countries and the experiences made so far.

Please contact Ms. Patricia Hurschler for further information.

Managing Controversial Technologies

PhD thesis

Technologies praised initially as problem solvers frequently turn into problem causers over time. Examples of these are Bisphenol A (used in epoxy resins, PVC), aromatic carbons, heavy metal containing electronic components (RoHS) or old chemical substances (REACH), electro-magnetic radiation sending devices, computer keyboards and pointing devices, antibiotics in animal feed, high-sugar potatoes or toner printing devices.

A main characteristic of controversial technologies is the uncertainty of their future. Normally the management of a controversial technology involves parties such as suppliers, regulators, clients and the media. Though the main strategy of regulators to ban controversial technologies seems to be obvious, effective laws and guidelines put into action differ greatly from these main goals. In addition, there is a tendency in politics to take actions against one single technology before a scientific basis for such claims has been established. All of these tendencies create an atmosphere of uncertainty to the firm, as outcomes of decision processes are unpredictable. Our research in this area therefore aims at providing tools for the management of the risks that are implied by the usage of such controversial technologies. Cooperating with companies from several industries, we will develop management concepts that can handle this uncertainty.

Please contact Mr. Andreas Biedermann for further information.

Structuring the Early Stages of the Product Innovation Process

PhD thesis

The fuzzy front-end of the product innovation process is often cited as the weakest point in the product innovation process. This fact represents a tremendous opportunity for businesses to improve the efficiency of this process through the development of a process, which can guide a cross-functional, perhaps geographically dispersed, team through a more structured, yet creative, front-end process

The purpose of this research is the structuring of the early stages to form a strong foundation for an efficient product development phase through front loading.  To this end, a project management tool for the pre-development phase of the front end was developed. The end product is a customizable tool to guide companies through a front-loaded innovation development process.

Please contact Ms. Nadia Jamali for further information.

Risk Management at the Board Level of multinational companies

PhD thesis

This thesis deals with the topic of Enterprise Risk Management at the Board level. There is much interest in the topic owing to some big catastrophes and corporate scandals in the recent past and all the leading corporate governance reports now put the onus of risk management and assurance on the boards of companies.

The thesis provides practical approaches, processes and tools for Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) in the companies. The approach devised in the thesis is also special as it can be applied in most of the risk management scenarios (in addition to ERM) such as risk management at various levels in an organization, project risk management, risk management for special risks such as IT- Risks, supply chain management risks, environment risks and contract risks.

Please contact Mr. Vinay Kalia for further information.