When the manufacturing industry becomes digitalised then innovation processes will be of great value

A research team at the University of Gävle under the leadership of Professor Aihie Osarenkhoe, has received SK 3.4 million from the Knowledge Foundation to study how two manufacturers handle the challenges when more and more of their value is created in innovation processes.

Tell us more Aihie Osarenkhoe, Professor of Business Administration at the University of Gävle:

What is the project about?

The basis for the project is that digitalisation of the manufacturing industry leads to new manufacturing logistics, which is something that businesses in the branch must consider.

We shall study how two manufacturing businesses handle the challenges when more and more of their value is found in interactive innovation processes.

Digitalisation comprises the enterprise in question where the different functions of the business, marketing, sales, product development, purchasing, production and distribution are all linked together and integrated into a digital flow of information. But also externally with suppliers and customers in several other directions.

What is new?

This project contributes towards inspecting a network perspective from a new angle. The network perspective does not consider a market as a place, but rather as a network of interwoven business relations.

It is this interaction and cooperation within and between different stakeholders that can contribute towards long term value-creation processes that strengthen the competitiveness of the business both nationally as well as in international contexts.

This central redistribution of resources has often been studied as an isolated phenomenon, where one took into account characteristics in each individual case, but ignored greater shifts of logic within industry.

An approach that has meant that individual companies have been neglected. We will fill that vacuum by, amongst other things, developing a model for the management of interactive innovation processes where even individual businesses can be incorporated in the creation of strategic networks.

What does this mean for education and for the University of Gävle?

Since 2013 we have worked to bring together the research competence of the Department of Business and Economics which has resulted in the development of the research theme "Sustainable business relationships."

” Sustainable business relationships” profiles the research of the department vis-à-vis other higher education institutions, as the focus on sustainable markets, strategic networks and risk management is lacking on the national and international research front.

The project will be run within the framework of the Knowledge Foundation’s program KKS-HÖG that is aimed at the establishment and development of new areas of research as well as creating possibilities for increased cooperation between academia and industry.

For further information, please contact:
Aihie Osarenkhoe, Professor i Business Administration, at the University of Gävle
Tel: 026-64 85 84, 070-191 45 26
Email: aihie.osarenkhoe@hig.se

Text: Douglas Öhrbom
Photo: Ove Wall