Technological innovation within EDS Italia Software: experience report

Abstract

Technological innovation and diffusion within an enterprise are key success factors. The introduction of a new technology aims to improve productivity and quality of production processes, and to better adapt the products to market needs. Therefore, it can be used to improve effectiveness and efficiency of business goals. Unfortunately, innovation is not always well seen and accepted in that it introduces a change of techniques and methods that are ingrained in the production processes. It is often judged as too high of a risk for management that is unable to evaluate the exact costs and consequent benefits. Because of these reasons it is necessary to support technological innovation with theoretical and empirical results and to gradually transfer them within production lines. This allows to better estimate risks, costs and benefits. To face these issues EDS Italia Software uses Industrial Research Projects as a mean for technological innovation. In this way it is able to evaluate the feasibility of an innovation and to carrying out a gradual technological transfer within enterprise process. This paper presents the EDS Software Italia Technological Transfer Process, based on the collaboration with several Italian Universities