Open Innovation (OI) revolves around the idea that to survive, organisations must identify, plug into, and leverage external knowledge sources as a core process in innovation. The creation and guarding of a suitable level of organisational permeability in the daily practice of OI can be challenging for both individuals and organisations as innovation processes also require openness as a social attitude. Looking at OI as real life multi-layered practices that are performed through talk and interaction, this dissertation examines how openness in OI is enabled through languaging. Close investigation of three industry-academia cases has shown that collaborators use interactional strategies to negotiate the extent of openness in meetings, to stimulate fearless knowledge sharing and to build and rebuild interpersonal relations and identities. While project work is laced with misunderstandings and negative perceptions on the one hand, openness and transparency are also highly valued by individuals on the other hand. When individuals have awareness of and ability to choose from a variety of linguistic options contingent on the social dynamics in the collaboration, this can further shape a knowledge-sharing-friendly atmosphere in which academics also feel free to pursue their own agenda. Through connecting the marco-environment and the micro-practices of the cases, it has become possible to integrate the rapidly changing context of industry-academia collaboration as a dynamic factor and to evaluate OI by the actualisation of its linguistic practices in its own regard. Hence, this dissertation describes the social, interactional and contextual boundaries of openness and shows how the linguistic choices that individuals make, enable OI as collaborative knowledge work beween industrials and academics.
After 15 years of digital openness in education with as its most visible elements OER and MOOCs, the open community is challenged to widen adoption of openness in teaching practices to (as Rogers puts it) the early and late majority of teachers. For them to adopt, the gain should be clear and directly visible to have them adopt openness. Arguments like it saves students money, it is efficient because you will not reinvent the wheel or publishing quality OER and MOOCs adds to the reputation of our institution are, how true they might be, not appealing to teachers who are in most cases crowded with their day-to-day teaching tasks. One approach to overcome this hurdle is to connect to the core of a teacher’s job: pedagogy. We assume each teacher has a vision on when his/her course can be called a success and what this means for activities s/he and the students have to perform. Many teachers experience challenges in realizing their optimal lectures. For some of these challenges forms of open online education can be of use, especially in enhancing pedagogical opportunities. The latter is called Open pedagogy. To create awareness of the world of open and the opportunities it may have, we have developed a workshop for teachers and teacher support. This workshop has been delivered several times in Fall 2016. In the presentation we elaborate on the content of this workshop, the experiences we had, the feedback of the participants and the impact it had after taking the workshop. The materials used in this workshop and a script is published under a CC BY license and is available in both Dutch and English. This creates the opportunity to conduct the workshop locally for everyone interested, stimulating/increasing chances for widespread adoption of open education in (formal) education.
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Manual labour is an important cornerstone in manufacturing and considering human factors and ergonomics is a crucial field of action from both social and economic perspective. Diverse approaches are available in research and practice, ranging from guidelines, ergonomic assessment sheets over to digitally supported workplace design or hardware oriented support technologies like exoskeletons. However, in the end those technologies, methods and tools put the working task in focus and just aim to make manufacturing “less bad” with reducing ergonomic loads as much as possible. The proposed project “Human Centered Smart Factories: design for wellbeing for future manufacturing” wants to overcome this conventional paradigm and considers a more proactive and future oriented perspective. The underlying vision of the project is a workplace design for wellbeing that makes labor intensive manufacturing not just less bad but aims to provide positive contributions to physiological and mental health of workers. This shall be achieved through a human centered technology approach and utilizing advanced opportunities of smart industry technologies and methods within a cyber physical system setup. Finally, the goal is to develop smart, shape-changing workstations that self-adapt to the unique and personal, physical and cognitive needs of a worker. The workstations are responsive, they interact in real time, and promote dynamic activities and varying physical exertion through understanding the context of work. Consequently, the project follows a clear interdisciplinary approach and brings together disciplines like production engineering, human interaction design, creative design techniques and social impact assessment. Developments take place in an industrial scale test bed at the University of Twente but also within an industrial manufacturing factory. Through the human centered design of adaptive workplaces, the project contributes to a more inclusive and healthier society. This has also positive effects from both national (e.g. relieve of health system) as well as individual company perspective (e.g. less costs due to worker illness, higher motivation and productivity). Even more, the proposal offers new business opportunities through selling products and/or services related to the developed approach. To tap those potentials, an appropriate utilization of the results is a key concern . The involved manufacturing company van Raam will be the prototypical implementation partner and serve as critical proof of concept partner. Given their openness, connections and broad range of processes they are also an ideal role model for further manufacturing companies. ErgoS and Ergo Design are involved as methodological/technological partners that deal with industrial engineering and ergonomic design of workplace on a daily base. Thus, they are crucial to critically reflect wider applicability and innovativeness of the developed solutions. Both companies also serve as multiplicator while utilizing promising technologies and methods in their work. Universities and universities of applied sciences utilize results through scientific publications and as base for further research. They also ensure the transfer to education as an important leverage to inspire and train future engineers towards wellbeing design of workplaces.
Within TIND, Christian Roth studies the training of interactive narrative designers with the goal of developing teaching methods and learning tools for artists and designers to enable the creation of more effective artefacts. Interactive Narrative Design (IND) is a complex and challenging interdisciplinary field introducing new affordances in technique and user-experience. This requires practice-based research for further development of the educational format, demonstrating its potential while identifying and overcoming common learners’ challenges. This project aims to develop a framework for the design and evaluation of meaningful interactive narrative experiences that effectively stimulate a variety of cognitive and emotional responses such as reflection, insight, understanding, and potential behavior change. It provides tools, methods and activities to enable aspiring or practicing narrative designers through an interdisciplinary approach, including game design, immersive theatre, behavioral and cognitive psychology, and the learning sciences. HKU education means to prepare students for success in the creative industries and IND plays an important role for current and future jobs in education, arts and entertainment. IND has the potential to create an emotional impact and spark transformative change by offering agency, defined as the ability to influence narrative progression and outcomes in a meaningful way. This enables interactors to feel the weight of their own choices and their consequences, to explore different perspectives, and to more thoroughly understand complex multi-stakeholder issues, which could have significant impact on the success of emerging artistic, and learning applications. The research project is directly embedded in the curriculum of the HKU school Games & Interaction with annual educational offerings such as the Minor Interactive Narrative Design (MIND) and HKU wide broad seminars. Course evaluation and literature research will be used to create new and adjusted training for different HKU schools and the industry. Outcomes will be shared via an interactive website and events.
