Are you fascinated by the potential emerging technologies have to solve societal challenges? Are you frustrated by how long it takes for those promising technologies to be successfully commercialized, or how little societal impact they have at the end? Are you passionate about creating more time-efficient, and effective, innovation processes? If so, join us in our quest to support the achievement of societal missions. We offer a fully-funded, four-year PhD position focused on accelerating mission-oriented innovation while balancing innovation speed and societal outcomes.
InformationYou will study how governments can accelerate the time-to-market of innovations while ensuring they are implemented responsibly to address urgent societal challenges, such as climate change. In the past decade, innovation policy has witnessed a shift toward large-scale ‘mission-oriented’ innovation policies, which imply the large mobilization of resources by governments to tackle these challenges. However, from a temporal perspective, mission-oriented policy is paradoxical. On the one hand, society needs solutions to be deployed urgently. On the other hand, mission-oriented innovation is highly complex, and rushing solutions may lead to counterproductive results and negative societal outcomes. The key problem is how to achieve the sweet spot between going too slow and too fast.
Your research will be driven by two research questions:
- How is time currently spent in mission-oriented innovation activities?
- How does public policy affect the time spent on mission-oriented innovation, and the societal outcomes?
To answer these questions, you will conduct a multiple case study, where you will study several R&D consortia over two years, which you will help optimize their innovation processes. You will use qualitative research techniques such as interviews, content analysis, and process modeling to map how R&D consortia spend their time, and why they cannot go faster. You will study how they interact with societal stakeholders, and how such interaction affects the outputs of their research. You will analyze a wide diversity of policies, including, but not limited to, funding schemes, and Dutch and European regulations in the areas of data privacy, health and safety, or employment. You will focus on the effect of those policies on innovation speed. In addition, you will organize several multistakeholder meetings, with public and private organizations, to discuss the results of your research, and possible alternatives to optimize existing policies. The output of your research will be used by a teammate to create a simulation model to optimize future innovation policy mixes.
As the selected PhD candidate, you will benefit from our outstanding academic development and collaborative work environment, as well as our strong ties to actors in industry and policymaking in the Netherlands and Europe. You will also receive support in the form of courses and on-the-job training to develop yourself into an independent academic researcher. In this way, you will be able to conduct high-quality research while ensuring the practical relevance of your work. You will also have the opportunity to interact closely with researchers in our department specializing in various aspects of innovation policy, design science, and open innovation.
The Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences (IE&IS) department combines disciplinary knowledge from the humanities, social sciences and technical sciences to solve the complex problems of industries and society. We collaboratively focus on and create responsible and effective innovations for the research themes: Humans and Technology, Supply Chain Management, Sustainability and Circularity, and Value of Data-Driven Intelligence.