http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/3774 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/6753 Complex System Classification Magee, Christopher de Weck, Olivier The use of terms such as “Engineering Systems”, “System of systems” and others have been coming into greater use over the past decade to denote systems of importance but with implied higher complexity than for the term systems alone. This paper searches for a useful taxonomy or classification scheme for complex Systems. There are two aspects to this problem: 1) distinguishing between Engineering Systems (the term we use) and other Systems, and 2) differentiating among Engineering Systems. Engineering Systems are found to be differentiated from other complex systems by being human-designed and having both significant human complexity as well as significant technical complexity. As far as differentiating among various engineering systems, it is suggested that functional type is the most useful attribute for classification differentiation. Information, energy, value and mass acted upon by various processes are the foundation concepts underlying the technical types. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/5064 Architecting and Innovating Campbell, Ronald B. Jr. Innovating is essential to sustained industrial growth and profitability. But experience amply demonstrates how difficult innovation is, especially for large companies. The synthesis of valued offerings by aligning customer needs with technology possibilities lies at the heart of innovation. System architects working at the strategic level are ideally positioned, as a consequence of their experience and training, to play a key and even a leadership role in enabling, energizing, and leading this synthesis. The scope of the architecting effort must include the process architecture of the entire value chain as well as the more conventional product architecture to address all potential wellsprings of innovation. This paper outlines an architecture-centric approach to innovation, based on the concept of the system platform architecture. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/3821 Establishing Quantitative Economic Value for Features and Functionality of New Products and New Services (CHAPTER N) Otto, Kevin Tang, Victor Seering, Warren This chapter has two key themes: (1) a list of customer needs is interesting, but insufficient for many development decisions, (2) establishing a quantified, dollar value for each requirement is more helpful. To that end, we present an approach and method to establishing the quantitative monetary value for new product features and performance. This approach is targeted to product development managers and engineers engaged at the “front-end” of the product development process when the decisions about selection and trade-off of product functions and features are made. This approach examines the customer’s business operations and essentially establishing their business case for your product down to the feature and performance levels. This provides for much better trade-off decisions in new product development. This approach also helps to identify whitespace opportunities, those new product and/or service opportunities that are not being served by any current product. Moreover, because the methodology is fine grained, the whitespace opportunities are resolved into clear and actionable product development projects. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/3820 Organizational Languages Wernerfelt, Birger The paper is concerned with communication within a team of players trying to coordinate in response to information dispersed among them. The problem is nontrivial because they cannot communicate all information instantaneously, but have to send longer or shorter sequences of messages, using coarse codes. We focus on the design of these codes and show that members may gain compatibility advantages by using identical codes, and that this can support the existence of several, more or less efficient, symmetric equilibria. Asymmetric equilibria may exist only if coordination across different sets of members is of sufficiently different importance. The results are consistent with the stylized fact that firm differ even within industries and that coordination between divisions is harder than coordination inside divisions.