Browsing by Person "Guffarth, Daniel"

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Ambidextrie in Netzwerken komplexer Produkte : Exploration und Exploitation in der Luftfahrtindustrie
(2016) Guffarth, Daniel; Pyka, Andreas
Since over 100 years, no comparable product exists that is so strongly related with engineering skills, pioneering spirit and the complex combination of materials, technique and knowledge, while being a prototypical example for high development and production cost at the same time. During the last century, industry changed dramatically through evolutionary and revolutionary technical and structural changes with government intervention playing a key role for industrial evolution. Today’s aircraft industry is in a growth phase which is determined by ramping up production scales which leads, in combination with the potentially new competitors from Asia and uprising regional aircraft manufacturers, to a situation in which the duopolists Airbus and Boeing are forced to shape their supply chains more efficient and effective. At the same time continuous technological novelties in subsystems and the high R&D-intensity are further recent challenges. With this dissertation a new industry evolution framework is developed which is coping with the complex products industries requirements by considering demand, state intervention and technological mechanisms. In complex product systems different subsystems of the artefact aircraft are in different stages of the technological life cycle at the same time. This is the reason why the classical implications between technology, product, and industry life cycle stages do not hold for complex products industries. I.e. solely focusing on the manufacturer level of an industry is not sufficient. Therefore in this dissertation, industry is defined as network. The design of this network as exploration or exploitation network focusing on product or process and/or both depends on time and manner. As permanently changing requirements are characteristic for complex products, organizations have to be able to be ambidextrous, i.e. to balance exploration and exploitation which is a decisive success factor in organizational long term survival. This requirement is analyzed on three levels within the R&D network of the European aircraft industry: knowledge development, structural and network topology, as well as on regional development. Key findings are the extension of ambidexterity in the network as well as in the supply chain over time. Therefore a change from cyclical to permanent ambidexterity is directed towards the suppliers. Additionally exploration is crowded out from the core of the network as routines and fossilized structure are established over time by repeatedly cooperating with other core actors. Therefore core actors use network peripheries as a vehicle to realize explorative projects and being permanently ambidextrous. As a consequence success factors for the sustainability of the European aircraft industry are the orchestration of network stability and network heterogeneity as well as the maintenance of the SME structure and interindustry linkages for usage of explorative learning.
Network evolution, success, and regional development in the European aerospace industry
(2014) Barber, Michael J.; Guffarth, Daniel
The success breeds success hypothesis has been mainly applied to theoretical network approaches. We investigate the European aerospace industry using data on the European Framework Programmes and on Airbus suppliers, focusing on the success breeds success hypothesis at four levels of analysis: the spatial structure of the European aerospace R&D collaboration network, its topological architecture, the individual actors that make up the network, and through a comparison of the Airbus invention and production networks. On the spatial level, SBS is favored: successful regions maintain their position and grow on a large scale, especially so for regions that have strongly participated from the very beginning. The regional hub structure is mirrored in the architecture of the European aerospace R&D collaboration network, where well-connected hub organizations play a key role in shaping the structure of the network through their many collaborative partnerships and do so in a way that strategically positions themselves with greater ability to access and regulate knowledge flows, as assessed by several centrality measures. Only successful organizations have the ability to form so many ties, with success thus breeding success in the European aerospace R&D collaboration network. The importance of the core organizations made clear through the centrality analysis is further supported by the analysis of weak ties, where we observe that the core organizations are connected to the rest of the network with many weak ties, thereby confirming their outstanding positions in the European aerospace R&D collaboration network as being able to access knowledge or other resources. With the combination of the R&D collaboration network and the Airbus production network on a spatial level, we see additional support for SBS, as those regions whose actors are frequent participants in both networks show the greatest share of successful actors. The European aerospace industry shows an ambidextrous character as a whole, which is nonetheless insufficient to avoid recent and future challenges demanding a strong emphasis on production skills.
The European aerospace R&D collaboration network
(2013) Barber, Michael J.; Guffarth, Daniel
We describe the development of the European aerospace R&D collaboration network from 1987 to 2013 with the help of the publicly available raw data of the European Framework Programmes and the German Förderkatalog. In line with the sectoral innovation system approach, we describe the evolution of the aerospace R&D network on three levels. First, based on their thematic categories, all projects are inspected and the development of technology used over time is described. Second, the composition of the aerospace R&D network concerning organization type, project composition and the special role of SMEs is analyzed. Third, the geographical distribution is shown on the technological side as well as on the actor level. A more complete view of the European funding structure is achieved by replicating the procedure on the European level to the national level, in our case Germany.