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Selected Highlights 2017
SFB 768: Managing Cycles in Innovation Processes – Integrated Development
of Product-Service Systems Based on Technical Products
The DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center (CRC)
768 ‘Managing Cycles in Innovation Processes’ is cur-
rently in the 10th of 12 funded years. It is based on the
collaboration of Technical University and Ludwig-Max-
imilians-University Munich. The CRC 768 involves the
following institutes of the Department of Mechanical
Engineering: Institute of Automation and Information
Systems, Institute of Product Development, Institute of
Machine Tools and Industrial Management, and Chair
of Automatic Control. The SFB 768 provides methods
and models to manage cyclic innovation processes in an
interdisciplinary way, including technical, economic and
social perspectives.
The focus of the SFB 768 is on the market area of com-
bining products and services to so-called product service
systems (PPS). Managing and shaping innovations in PPS
under consideration of cyclic influences is the objective
of the SFB 768, aiming to support German companies
to evolve their position in the market with methods and
domain-spanning coupled models.
In 2017, an industrial colloquium was successfully organ-
ized with top-class representatives from globally active
companies to discuss and mutually enrich ideas within
the interactive workshops; Inconsistency Management,
Stakeholder Integration, Knowledge Management and
Change Management. The transfer of research results to
industry and the transfer of industry expertise to aca-
demia was a great benefit for all participants. Addition-
ally, the event’s participants experienced substantiated
speeches from different industry domains within the
context of PPS and Cyber-Physical Production Systems
(CPPS), moderated discussions and an atmospheric get
together.
The year 2017 was very fruitful for CRC768: the massive
open online course (MOOC) was launched, as well as the
first prototype of a publicly accessible platform, called
‘Gestaltenplattform’. This platform collects, recaptures
and presents research results of the CRC768 over the
last 10 years, to benefit closer cooperation and exchange
between industry and science.
To achieve holistic management of innovation processes,
the perspective has been extended to a socio-technical
view. In seventeen sub-projects from mechanical engi-
neering, economics, business informatics, psychology and
sociology, a unique interdisciplinary research perspective
on innovation processes is developed and is being con-
tinuously strengthened. Within the transfer projects, the
research results are validated using real industry scenarios
Visualizing model dependencies within a cross discipline interactive model network