Industrial Engineering and Management

Innovations and renewal are vital for the success of companies in different fields as well as for public organisations. Innovation management research aims to publish in leading scientific publications, create sustainable competitiveness in industry and service organisations, and generate social significance.

The Innovation Management team's research focuses on the following:

• Innovation processes and networks
• Development and application of methods that support managerial decision-making
• Management of product and service life cycles
• Promotion of sustainability-oriented innovation activities
• Practice-based innovations
• Digitalisation and product, service, and process innovations.

The research team has a long track record in evolving innovation management in collaboration with companies. The business and value perspectives are at the core of the activities in order to guarantee world-class research in collaborative projects. Our most important cooperation partners in research projects are companies that are leaders in their own field, international and national research institutes, Tekes and the EU, and especially the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme.

The Supply Chain and Operations Management team studies and teaches structures, processes and operational models of organisations. It develops theories and solutions for improving the performance of organisations, value chains and networks.

The Supply Chain and Operations Management team's research focuses on the following themes:

• Sustainable business models, networks and supply chains
• Professional service systems and operations management

The current research focuses on understanding how business models should be designed to create sustainable value in the networks of companies (e.g. business models in circular economy networks). The research provides tools with which firms can analyse and redesign their business models, value networks, and supply chains to become more sustainable.

Professional service systems and operations management research develops theories and solutions for improving the efficiency of the processes in professional public sector organisations and for developing methods that support organisational change. The ongoing research projects focus on health care and judicial systems.

The Cost Management team C3M (Capital, Capacity and Cost Management) studies and teaches methods of cost management and asset life cycle management from the perspective of managerial decision-making. The research aims to develop models and analyses for industrial companies and service organisations.

The two main themes of the research are industrial asset management and working capital management. The research addresses for example the following topics:

• Life cycle cost models
• Asset management in business networks and ecosystems
• Value of industrial maintenance services and digitalisation (IoT)
• Cycle times of working capital and profitability
• Working capital models in value chain

The Performance Management team has extensive knowledge of and experience in performance measurement, analysis and the construction of measurement systems in various dimensions of performance in many contexts. In addition to its scientific contribution, the team's research also provides practical tools and methods for companies and other organisation.

The research of the Performance Management team focuses on the following themes:

• Sustainable and holistic performance measurement and management
• Measurement and management of the effectiveness, productivity and renewal of business

The Systems Engineering team teaches and studies methods for complex system analysis and synthesis. It sees modern systems as blends of interacting socio-technical elements in various domains (technological, economic, social, environmental, etc.) during a system's lifetime – from design to utilisation.

The team develops interdisciplinary quantitative and qualitative approaches to the design and synthesis of complex systems.

The research addresses the following topics:

• Systematic methods for system conceptual design (TRIZ and other algorithms for conceptual design support, automated data/text mining, patent/paper data processing)
• Modelling and simulation of complex systems (mathematical modelling, simulations, scenario analysis)
• Optimisation (methods for system parameter optimisation, optimisation of structures)
• System control (control and management design, programme and feedback control, control quality)