Driving Business Value in Industrial Innovation: Disciplined Agility for Manufacturing Automation

Executives, innovators, and consulting professionals at the forefront of industrial innovation want to unlock business value for their companies and clients, and create technology-based platforms for growth across manufacturing sector. This book addresses the expectation for developing a respectable ROI based on the use of automation and control in manufacturing. It also tackles an industrial innovation dilemma: technology-based industry with mature business models and dominance by incumbents versus. impetus for survival that requires finding new value.

The automation and control industry offers a case study with concrete examples of market, technology and human capital factors shaping business value opportunities. This is a guide for automation innovators looking to improve the performance of their innovation operations and for manufacturers looking to drive greater economic value by incorporating automation. Agility is critical for sustaining responsiveness to highly cyclical business demand and unrelentingly disruptive technology supply. The prescriptive guidance for incumbents provided herein is for opportunistic risk-based adoption of disciplined agility by incorporating eight enabling practices: transitioning to agile, investing in agile capability, managing critical system parameters, engineering system-robustness, balancing project risk, conducting continuous system validation, assuring domain expertise, and clarifying the ecosystem role.