Kresten Storgaard

Bio: Kresten Storgaard is an academic researcher from Aalborg University – Copenhagen. The author has contributed to research in topics: Urban planning & Facility management. The author has an hindex of 6, co-authored 56 publications receiving 267 citations. Previous affiliations of Kresten Storgaard include Aalborg University.

Employees in the dual role of employee and end-user - a new source of innovation for companies?

Abstract: This study describes a process in which a company involves an employee as the enduser in the innovation activities of the company. While it has been recognised that endusers sometimes innovate and that user/producer relations are important for product development, little is known about employees in the dual role of end-user and employee. This paper argues that companies can benefit from using employees as end-users in their innovation activities. This research is based on a qualitative case study of a major manufacturer of building materials. The study draws on user-driven innovation theories and innovation theories in general. This case indicates that it has been an advantage to involve the employee as a user in the innovation activities of the company as this gives the company access first of all to a new context – the user’s context – which is detached from the traditional bindings of the company, and secondly to new knowledge that is based on the user’s generation of knowledge and lessons learnt in the use situation. The investigation shows that employees as end-users can contribute to companies’ innovation activities concerning the product, the organisation and the marketing. However, in order to benefit from this new type of collaboration, the company may consider how this process influences the practices of both the company and the employees, and attention must be paid to the dilemmas resulting from the process.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

Abstract: How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

Abstract: The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Science in action

Abstract: Ecological Engineering: Journal of Ecotechnology. Editor-in-chief William J. Mitsch. Elsevier. 4/yr. DFL 361, $195.

City of bits: space, place and the infobahn

Abstract: O ne of the continuing challenges of the information revo lution of the past few decades is that the important "stuff" of the technology is beyond the capabilities of our human senses. We can't see the bits in our computers or the electrons that represent them. We can write our thoughts and translate those thoughts into software code, but we can only imagine the logic flows, branches, and data movements that occur as that code is converted to electrons and executed. We send all these electrons into networks, where the electrons that represent the code are chunked into packets, disassembled and assembled, causing our thoughts to visit places and follow routes that our physical bodies could never go. We call this imaginary world "virtual," as though the label makes it real. We create analogs to what our senses can deal with. We talk about files and architectures and highways, pages and webs, all of which we sort of understand in the real world, thus giving us Slippery handles on the virtual. The truth is scary: our physical bodies are irrelevant in the virtual world. William Mitchell, Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, spends 225 pages trying to relate the two worlds, but early on he tells us that he knows better by showing us the famous New Yorker cartoon of two dogs in front of a personal computer saying, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"...or if you're tall or short, young or old, strong or sick...all of which are crucial in the physical world. In many ways, what Mitchell is doing in this book is important. Creating analogs from the unknown to the known helps us manage the acceptance of the new technology. Mitchell shows these comparisons explicitly in his section headings; e.g., "Schoolhouses/Virtual Campuses," "Galleries/Virtual Museums," "Tangible Goods/Intellectual Property." These analogs not only help us better understand and accept the novel and unknown, but the analogies help us apply the new in ways that far extend the capabilities of the old. So, in our virtual museum in one time and place, we are able to see paintings that physically exist in galleries tens of thousands of miles apart, without the burden of crowds or jet lag. The virtual campus can bring to the most remote schoolhouse the best lessons of the best teachers, regardless of where or when those lessons were physically articulated. But extending the old capabilities can be either a way station to or a side track away from the ultimate benefits of the virtual world. The technology to let go of our physical selves is ready, but our society is not. Our past, built on what our senses can tell us, is an anchor keeping us stuck in the harbor of known, preventing us from sailing into the sea of unknown. Looking at birds for thousands of years got us only Icarus. It was not poor ships that kept Vikings and Phoenicians close to shore; it was fear of the dragons on the maps where the known seas ended. Again, Mitchell knows this and hints about it a bit. For example, in his discussion of Bookstores/Bit Stores, he talks about the old world of the large urban newspaper: "When the Chicago Tribune Tower was constructed, it stood as the proudly visible center of a vast collection and distribution system and as an emblem of the power of the press. Every day the news flowed in and the printed papers flowed out to the surrounding metropolis. But on the infobahn, where every node is potentially both a publication and a consumption point, such centralized concentrations of activity will be supplanted by millions of dispersed fragments." Mitchell thus hints at hut doesn't mention the long-envisioned world of Xanadu described by Ted Nelson, arguably the father of hypertext, a real break with the linear flow of the printing press paradigm, possible only in cyberspace.