Projects

Please find a short overview of selected research projects here.

INTERREG IV Cooperation Project
In the context of an INTERREG project, the Institute of Technology Management together with the partners Fachhochschule Vorarlberg, Hochschule Liechtenstein / SME Centre and Hochschule Kempten aims at establishing a platform for project and process management. The intention is to advance inter-company exchange on the current state of knowledge in this area. The platform offers regular product and software development workshops for which managers with responsibilities in those domains are invited to participate.
Due to the support of the international INTERREG IV regional development program, the workshops are especially interesting for small and medium sized companies that get reimbursed a considerable part of the incidental costs. For further information please refer to the "Jahooda" platform of the Fachhochschule Vorarlberg (in German only).


InnoPower: Stärkung der frühen Innovationsphase von KMUs unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Sektors Energie
This research project is supported by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE) and aims at better understanding the early phases of the innovation process of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the energy sector. This part of the economy is currently subject to considerable technological and structural changes, offering SMEs interesting opportunities to transfer their traditional competences to attractive industries. While the SFOE and other agencies have focused on being competent partners in the realisation of concrete projects and market introductions, there is little systematic knowledge about how SME in the energy sector conceive of and develop innovative new products in an early phase. A better understanding of the important factors in this area could help stimulating the extent and quality of such activity by Swiss SME. Therefore, this study aims at analysing central aspects of the early phase of the innovation process, such as idea generation, early evaluation, selection and decision processes and the extent of inter-organisational cooperation and to derive approaches for its improvement in the context of the Swiss energy sector.