Cooperation with Rotterdam School of Management

The coming months students of the Rotterdam School of Management are doing a research on how the challenges of innovation can be overcome. The goal is to learn more on the application of innovations and technologies in organizations and to hopefully improve the program of De Digitale Rivier.

Background

Digital tools have become the driving forces behind the success of organizational initiatives. This has caused that the digital component has become key to creating and capturing value, by connecting the industrial sector with potential users of their ideas and products. While the digital approach develops fast, it still has some challenges to overcome. One of those is that experimenting with and the development of innovations is necessary to be done in cooperation with many stakeholders. This means that different methods should be set in motion to allow stakeholders to be exposed to new technologies, to create and share knowledge and to develop their culture of innovation with help of new techniques.

De Digitale Rivier as a case

The program De Digitale Rivier is used as a specific case, because it s an example of a method to overcome the challenges of participation and digitalization in the light of the activities of Rijkswaterstaat. Four different students will work in an “umbrella project” with different focuses. With their findings, lessons are learned on potential concepts to apply digital innovations in practice. Plus, potentially the program gains some lessons on how to improve itself. Next year, more information will become available on this side-project. In February the goal is to publish an interview with the thesis coach, Juan Pablo Madiedo PhD, to see what the students have found until then. We are very curious on how this research will develop the coming weeks!