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Design for manufacture and assembly (DfMA) challenges architects in managing diverse knowledge across different professional domains. Little research, if any, has documented DfMA as a knowledge-intensive activity happening in real-life cases. This research aims to investigate DfMA knowledge acquisition, sharing and implementation in real-life practice and develop DfMA knowledge-to-action framework for architects.

It does so by (1) conducting observations in design meetings, documentary analysis and interviews, (2) thematic analysis through knowledge management (KM) perspectives and (3) based on this profound understanding, enriching the prior understanding of design as a double diamond process.

Through the lens of KM, DfMA is not merely a double but multiple diamond process, involving the iteration of making absenting interdisciplinary knowledge available, deciphering tacit knowledge explicit and embedding the knowledge in a design that well considers various criteria, the downstream manufacturing, logistics and assembly in particular. To execute multi-faceted knowledge acquisitions and implementations in DfMA, architects should balance their roles as humble learners, team coordinators, creative leaders and democratic negotiators.

This research reveals the DfMA implementation process, activities and dilemmas from real-world design meetings. The DfMA knowledge-to-action framework developed in this study, along with practice examples and lessons learned, can facilitate architects to play new roles. Future research is recommended to fine-tune the framework by having other stakeholders’ perspectives, refining it with additional cases and developing assistive tools for designers based on the framework.

This study, adopting a knowledge perspective, aims to explore how small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) engage in service innovation by implementing design thinking.

A qualitative research methodology and a multiple case study strategy were adopted on account of the exploratory nature of this study. Three cases based in Scotland have been selected. Data were collected from staff, managers and researchers who participated in Create Cultures of Innovation (CCoI), a project sponsored by the Scottish government.

The research shows that SMEs can be enabled, through design-led interventions, to think collaboratively and leverage knowledge to achieve service innovation.

This research contributes to the service innovation literature by theorising an integrated research framework of “Knowledge exchange in SMEs service innovation with design thinking”. Further, this study enriches the extant understanding of service innovation in the traditional sector (manufacturing and hospitality) and redefines the roles and relations of the dimensions of service innovation.

This study addresses the call on tools and methods for servitisation, suggesting that changing the culture and mindsets of both the top management and the staff are critical for the success of servitisation and the implementation of design thinking. In addition, this research suggests the need to embed design thinking within the leadership prior to rolling it out to the wider public. Support from the top management should focus on both the engagement of staff and the changing of vision from product to service-focused.

This paper gets together service innovation, design thinking and knowledge exchange in the context of manufacturing SMEs offering novel insights into how to succeed in servitisation with the implementation of design thinking.

Project managers rely on control strategies to deliver excellent outputs. However, little is known about how clients' project managers select control strategies in projects which are knowledge-intensive and have intangible outputs. This study aims to examine how clients' project managers select project control strategies in professional service projects.

A questionnaire survey of 360 architectural and engineering (A/E) design projects was adopted. Data were analyzed through the hierarchical regression.

Both clients' knowledge of measuring outcomes and process uncertainty give rise to their project managers setting up behavior and social controls. Level of process uncertainty positively moderates the impact of client's knowledge of measuring outcomes on outcome control.

This study mainly examined the client's knowledge of measuring outcomes and process uncertainties. Future studies could be conducted to expand the scope by including other contextual factors, for instance market and regulatory factors.

From the client side, if they want to simultaneously adopt outcome, behavior and social controls, they would need to increase their knowledge of measuring outcomes by adopting established assessment tools or appointing a third party to assist in design outcome evaluation.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge by showing that the level of intangibility of project outputs influences the types of control system which project managers adopt.

That knowledge acquisition from external sources can play a pivotal role in product design is a well-known fact. However, knowledge acquisition need not play a pivotal role in every context; it is also documented to have a dark side (i.e. negative impacts). Specifically, given that product stewardship, by definition, calls on each party in the product life cycle – including suppliers – to share responsibility for the environmental impact of products, the purpose of this study is to answer the question “whether knowledge acquired from suppliers plays a beneficial role in the context of product stewardship?”

This study focuses on the effect of knowledge acquisition on product stewardship and its subsequent effect on environmental performance. Given that the effect of knowledge acquisition could be moderated by firm-specific and relational factors, this study also considers the moderating role of knowledge exploitation and supplier opportunism. Using primary data, the hypotheses are tested using two-stage hierarchical ordinary least squares regression models involving valid instruments.

Though extant research doubts that knowledge acquisition will always be beneficial, this study adheres to the tenets of knowledge-based view and hypothesize that knowledge acquisition is pivotal to product stewardship and its subsequent impact on environmental performance. But the results suggest an intriguing double-edged effect of knowledge acquisition; while its direct effect on product stewardship is nonsignificant, it seemed to have a significant positive moderating effect on the relationship between product stewardship and environmental performance. But whenever knowledge exploitation and supplier opportunism are maintained at ideal levels, this double-edged effect of knowledge acquisition is successfully negated.

While knowledge acquisition is key for new product design, its specific role in the product design that incorporates environmental considerations is still not clear. By proposing that knowledge acquisition could instead have a double-edged effect within the unique context of product stewardship, the study makes an invaluable contribution to the extant literature on knowledge management within supply chain relationships.

This study aims to develop a synthetic knowledge repository consisted of interrelated Web Ontology Language.

The ontology composes the main framework to categorize data of product life cycle with eco-design mode (PLC-EDM) and automatically infer specialists’ knowledge for data confirmation, eventually assisting the utilizations and generation of strategies toward decision-making

(i) utilization of a novel model with ontology mode for information reuse cross the different eco-design applications; (ii) generation of a sound platform toward life cycle evaluation; and (iii) implementation of the PLC-EDM model along the product generation process.

It cannot substitute an evaluation tool of life cycle. Certainly, this model does not predict the “target and range” and/or the depiction of the “utility module” that are basic activities in life cycle assessments as characterized through the international organization for standardization regulations.

As portion of this framework, a prototype Web application is presented which is applied to produce, reuse and verify knowledge of product life cycle.

By counting upon the ontology, the information conducted by the utilization is certainly semantically represented to promote the data sharing among various participants and tools. Besides, the data can be verified against possible faults by inferring over the ontology. Hence, a feasible way to a popular topic in the domain of eco-design applications extension in the industry.

The goals are: to lean on rigid modeling principles; and to promote the interoperability and diffusion of the ontology toward particular utilization demands.

Drawing on organizational learning and dynamic capabilities literature, this study aims to explore how suppliers from traditional emerging economies (STEE) can acquire, assimilate and use new knowledge essential for the development of production and marketing capabilities. These capabilities then facilitate suppliers in climbing the value chain from B-to-B to B-to-C.

The study adopted a longitudinal and multiple case study design to examine the practices of suppliers operating in a traditional emerging economy setting. This study selected Pakistan textile industry as an empirical setting, which is a predominantly supplier market for global buyers. Data sources entail semi-structured interviews with top executives and senior-level managers in four case firms and secondary data obtained from diverse sources.

The study identified transitionary phases of capabilities development that are facilitated by boundary-spanning knowledge acquisition and transformation in a dynamic manner. These capabilities are essential for a supplier’s entry into downstream international markets (i.e. launching its own products/brands in the end consumers’ market).

The findings could help managers in STEEs to understand the strategic importance of supply chain ties in their learning and capabilities development. It also provides strategic insights on what, how and why involved parties do engage over an extended period of time. Moreover, the findings of this study could help other firms to know and adopt the right type of technology(s) and systems that can help them reduce the technological gap in producing and marketing market-winning products.

This study advances the recent academic discussion that focusses on learning by supplying and the value-chain movement of suppliers (i.e. B-to-C) from their B-to-B engagements. The findings identified the vital and beneficial role of long-term relationships with global value chain partners in learning and capabilities development that led to value creation in the traditional emerging economy.

The purpose of the research is to substantiate the possibilities of the development of ecological design in the process of future designers professional training and the implementation of student projects in practice.

This article offers one of the possible ways to solve the problem of rational use of wastes of natural resources in the projects of design students. In Ukraine, the ecological direction acquires national features and many Ukrainian manufacturers associate this mainly with ecologically clean materials: this is most typical for furniture products and traditional construction made of wood. The proposed technique is an effective tool for analyzing the interaction of environmental and design disciplines at different levels, as well as an effective criterion for evaluating methods of structuring educational material. The introduction of the correlation index makes assessing the effectiveness of the application of environmental knowledge in design possible.

The analysis of the world ecological design experience makes presenting the Ukrainian experience of environmental design possible, the origins of which date back to the 1920s of the 20th century. In terms of the purpose and methods of education, the authors consider art and industrial schools to be the primary basis of design education in Ukraine. In the 1990s of the 20th century, on the material and technical bases, educational-methodical and staffing with experienced teachers that design departments are formed, which train and graduate certified designers in various specializations. The need for readiness to solve the tasks of environmental education of future designers in the context of end-to-end environmental training is an urgent problem. Relying on ecological concepts makes optimally structuring the educational material possible, taking into account the requirements for both environmental and professional training.

Studies have established that the application of the authors' method of continuous environmental education has a positive effect on the assimilation of environmental knowledge and method's use in professional theory. Increasing the rates of assimilation and application of environmental knowledge by students has a positive effect on the interaction of environmental and professional knowledge.

The practical significance of the project consists in the implementation of the development of design projects on specific topics, including competitive, diploma and master's theses. The presented examples of designer shaping from wastes are expressive examples to follow in educational design, important for the development of students' creative and ecological thinking. The methodology is tested in several institutions of higher education in Ukraine, and the authors hope that this can spread in other countries, in particular in the training of designers specializing in “Furniture Design.”

Ecodesign is gradually being established in the general structure of design theory and, accordingly, has the right to an independent role in the formation of new principles of shaping the spatial and object environment of human life.

New approaches require new educational standards, curricula and teaching methods, directed in particular to the development of a systemic interdisciplinary approach.

This paper aims to review the existing literature on structured corporate–startup collaboration programs (SCSCPs) concerning their objectives and organizational design components. The design components of the program execution are analyzed on how they impact knowledge transfer and how the extant literature on SCSCP considers the knowledge management topic. A new perspective to examine its ramifications will be discussed.

Through an integrative literature review, 103 papers on the topic of SCSCP are analyzed about references of objectives and design components of the programs.

The literature shows a strong focus on strategic objectives corporations pursue in implementing an SCSCP. The design components can be divided into governance mode, structural decisions, selection of ventures, program execution and follow up.

The literature review shows a lack of insights into the knowledge transfer process between the corporation and the ventures. Therefore, this study suggests a practice-based, longitudinal perspective on the interaction processes that occur during the program execution of an SCSCP.

Compared to existing literature reviews, the study takes the corporation’s perspective on incubation and acceleration and reveals design components specific to the corporate forms. Furthermore, SCSCPs center around strategic value generation and the design of the programs can vary highly. It is proposed that knowledge transfer is the central aspect of corporate programs and that a practice-based perspective would enrich the research on knowledge transfer in highly complex setups like this.

This paper describes the curriculum design of an architectural studio course aimed at making concepts of sustainability accessible, understandable and practicable to second-year undergraduate students. Architectural education and design pedagogy is shaped and interrogated in the Global North or Western Europe and North America and influences various pedagogical approaches in the Global South. By including exemplars, voices and practices from global, historical, vernacular and contemporary contexts, understanding of sustainability is enriched.

The approach to course design included decolonising the curriculum and making it relevant for globally diverse future professionals. The studio theme of “memory and history” was framed as responsiveness to context and experiencing the site. Students were required to define place, and articulate form and space with sensitivity towards social, cultural, environmental and ecological aspects. The lectures, exercises and interactive activities emphasised design process, in-progress work, and experimentation through sketching, diagramming, drawing, and making study models which scaffolded student learning under the guidance of tutors.

The findings show that to make the process of learning to design in an environmentally responsive manner explicit for students, approaches to curriculum design must have a global and inclusive curriculum, engage students in experiential learning through doing/making to develop critical thinking skills, encourage students to synthesise and transfer learning to and from other settings and contexts, and interpret knowledge-power relationships and co-construction processes embedded in studio-based teaching and learning.

The original contribution of the course is that it creates an inclusive, experimental and decolonised space for co-construction of knowledge about designing sustainable environments.

Customers' co-design behavior is an important source of knowledge for product innovation. Firms can regulate the focus of information interaction with customers to set goals and motivate their co-design behavior. Drawing on regulatory fit theory and construal level theory, the authors build a research model to study whether the fit between the regulatory focus of firms' task invitations (promotion focus vs prevention focus) and their feedback focus (self-focused vs other-focused) can enhance co-design behavior by improving customers' experiences (perceived meaning, active discovery and perceived empowerment).

The authors conducted two online between-subjects experiments to validate the proposed research model.

The two online experiments reveal that customers' experiences are enhanced when the feedback focus is congruent with the regulatory focus of the firm's task invitations. Specifically, self-focused feedback has a stronger positive effect on customers' experiences in the prevention focus context. Other-focused feedback has a stronger positive effect on customers' experiences in the promotion focus context. Moreover, customers' experience significantly and positively affects co-design behavior (i.e. co-design effort and knowledge contribution).

This work provides theoretical and practical implications for firms to improve the effectiveness of information interaction with their customers and eventually ensure the sustainability of co-design.