How can academia help industry in adopting best practices that immediately create efficiencies? Can the traditional difficulties in scaling agile project management be resolved with new evidence-based mechanisms? How can crowdsourcing, which solicits donations from large groups of people, be best adapted, applied and validated in environments traditionally unsuited to its use?
Engagement and Impact
With over €4 million funding from Science Foundation Ireland, Enterprise Ireland, EU grants and industry, this research cluster offers unparalleled expertise to academia, industry and policy makers.
A core activity is the researcher-industry knowledge exchange. These exchanges take place every three months and provide evidence-based insights on software implementation and management issues. This enables the Agile and Open Innovation research cluster to create tangible research outcomes that are immediately applicable to organisation settings. The team works with SMEs including Lumension, SourceDogg and Information Mosaic – and multinationals like Cisco, HP and Intel – to deliver solutions to software agility issues.
In Cisco, for example, they have applied modern lean approaches and metrics with teams around the world, uncovering inefficiencies and improving overall team and organisational effectiveness. To help improve industry decision-making, they have examined the use of decision quality indicators and the optimisation of data presentation for effective decision-making. The feedback to industry has resulted in better quality decisions and greater efficiencies during the decision-making process.
Research-Led Teaching
Agile and Open Innovation research cluster takes an integrated approach to teaching and research. The MSc. in Cloud Computing draws heavily from research led by Dr. Tom Acton and Trevor Clohessy and was shortlisted in three categories in the 2014 GradIreland Graduate Recruitment awards.
Cross-Cutting Research
Information Systems is still a relatively young field with research examining the application of technology and its impact across broad aspects of social and business value. This means that rich collaborations are possible with medicine, science, engineering as well as mainstream management.
As funding agencies look increasingly towards collaborative funding programmes with tangible commercialisation outputs, the Agile and Open Innovation research cluster is uniquely positioned given its size, scale and complimentary skillsets for meaningful collaboration with University partners, Industry and funding agencies.
If you would like to research agility problems, or your company would like some help in solving them, contact the cluster leader Dr. Lorraine Morgan.
Research Focus
As organisations face increasing global competition, rapidly developing technologies and dwindling resources, being able to implement dynamic practices and processes has become vital. Agile and Open Innovation cluster members work at the cutting edge of software creation and management, giving unique insights into how software can benefit organisations and policy makers, while also setting the academic research agenda.
For example, the tangible value of agile and lean practices in organisations has not been quantified to-date. The Agile and Open Innovation research cluster is devising a metric-based assessment to address this. Firms face many difficulties scaling agile project management, traditionally restricted to small co-located teams up to complex portfolios across hundreds of products and thousands of staff. Agile and Open Innovation is developing evidence-based solutions to address this problem. Finally, the team are also devising ways in which crowdsourcing can be best adapted, applied and validated in environments traditionally unsuited to its use.
With experts in accounting, business information systems, management and psychology, the Agile and Open Innovation cluster is helping organisations evaluate existing practices and identify best practice solutions, which immediately create organisation efficiencies. The team focuses on two overarching themes:
- Evolving software that examines contemporary (agile and lean) software management, portfolio management and decision making.
- Open innovation practices and frameworks, which include research on software ecosystems, crowdsourcing, cloud technologies and design thinking.