Assistant Professor

Alex Alblas

Department
Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences

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.  

  • Fundamentals of Product Innovation
  • Product innovation processes

Ancillary Activities

No ancillary activities