Internet of Things and Digital Manufacturing in Chicago

Assignment

Organizational Models of Innovation teaches how to strategically enterprise design abilities in open innovation systems. Enterprising design strategies, the capacity to effectively innovate by integrating skills, techniques, sensibilities, practices, processes, and strategies that are institutionally and geographically dispersed has become the biggest challenge for any organization or initiative dependent on innovation to be successful. In this course, students learn how to enterprise design strategies in organizations by learning key concepts, analyzing organizational models through the lenses of design strategies, and modeling design-driven practices and team dynamics in organizations.

Synopsis

The development and widespread adoption of new technological capabilities, such as information technology and digital manufacturing enable structural transformations in traditional patterns of production and consumption. They disrupt and reconfigure old infrastructures into new configurations. They change not only how things are produced, but also the organizational models that produce them.

In this course, students explored new organizational models for innovation that can be adopted in innovation districts. We will look for new ways to organize design capabilities, information technology, and digital manufacturing in the city of Chicago in order to shape open innovation systems for the production and consumption of Internet of Things. Discussions were centered around speculating ‘In what ways design capabilities can be integrated to information technology and digital manufacturing systems of production?’; ‘What organizational models are most effective in integrating design capabilities into innovation districts, such as in the city of Chicago?’; ‘What new capabilities are necessary for design to be a fundamental know-how in shaping the development and adoption of Internet of Things products and services?’

If designers can envision new practices and new modes of collaboration, they can enterprise design through new organizational models, becoming leaders and entrepreneurs well positioned to define the best use of the new possibilities being unleashed by the developments from the Internet of Things and Digital Manufacturing happening locally in the innovation district of Chicago, as part of a national and global network.