Alex Alblas
Department

RESEARCH PROFILE
Alex Alblas is an Assistant Professor of Product and Process Innovation in the Innovation, Technology Entrepreneurship & Marketing (ITEM) group of the School of Industrial Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology. Alex’s research activity focused on how organizations can successfully manage the invention, development and launch of new products. His ambition is to contribute to the challenges and mechanisms related to enhancing and speeding up learning curves in new product development. In this quest he is currently investigating the learning curve effects of design change, caused by design iteration, design debugging, and evolving insights, and the resulting process changes. He has a special interest in the operational practices of new product development that lead to enhanced performance. In one research project he investigates the learning mechanisms in which agile operations and iterative product development can lead to performance improvement. In another big industry funded research project, of which Alex is the project leader, he investigates together with a team of researchers the practices in which product development and customer service processes enable service improvements.
ACADEMIC BACKGROUND
Alex Alblas received his PhD in Innovation Management from the University of Groningen, in 2011, and an MSc in Industrial Engineering and a BSc in Technology Management from the same University (2006). He has previously worked as a Process Improvement Specialist with ASML, where he was involved in a challenging project about learning curve improvement in the new product introduction phase. At the University of Groningen, he worked as a researcher and advisor in the ‘Deployment of Sustainability Metrics (DoSyM)’ project. The objective of this is to respond to the challenges companies face in selecting and then embedding sustainability metrics in new product development projects. The project focuses on supply chain and innovation network issues when using these metrics.
Recent Publications
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Designing for Resilience: How Dutch Maternity Care Collaborations Anticipate, Adapt and Thrive during a Pandemic
Administrative Sciences (2022) -
Globally distributed technology projects thrive on experience working together apart
Journal of Operations Management (2022) -
How structural empowerment boosts organizational resilience
Organization Studies (2022) -
Tailoring the Engineering Design Process Through Data and Process Mining
IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (2022) -
Utilizing product design complexity to predict production cycle time learning curves
29th International Annual EurOMA Conference 2022 (2022)
- Fundamentals of Product Innovation
- Product innovation processes
Ancillary Activities
No ancillary activities