Decision-making criteria for innovation implementation on TU Delft campus

Abstract

Campus as inter-disciplinary technological playground for sustainable technology experiments and implementation is a dream TU Delft strives for. However, innovation implementation on the university campus is nonetheless considered a risk due to the embedded uncertainty of any innovation. This uncertainty leads to several questions about the decisions to implement innovations on campus. Answering this question is the motivation behind this study, aimed at enabling effective implementation of innovation on our campus. We identified the decision making criteria used by a variety of employees who regularly face innovation implementation challenges on campus on campus.

We used two decision support systems to identify and explain the relative importance of the decision making criteria. The first approach was executed by a TU Delft spin-off Councyl.ai. Councyl.ai’s decision support model was built to identify the decision-making criteria and then through a choice experiment identify the relative weight of those criteria.

In a second approach, the PAS design and decision approach, developed by Prof. Monique Arkesteijn from TU Delft (2019), was used to develop the decision framework and relative importance of each criteria.

This project has been successful in distilling the most important criteria used during implicit assessment of innovation projects on campus, a great achievement in itself. However these two approaches do not indicate the same relative weight of the decision-making criteria, suggesting that innovation projects are very diverse and the importance of criteria change along with the project description and context for implementation.

This brings us one step closer to clearly communicating to innovators and amongst ourselves which decision-making criteria are implicitly taken into consideration for implementation of innovation on campus. It clarifies the steps that need to be taken to manage and mitigate risk, and increase the likelihood of innovators registering their interest in placing their innovations on campus, as well as the likelihood that campus managers will allocate the necessary resources to the project.

We trust this report, in conjunction with the other research projects run at the Campus research team, will be beneficial in providing the necessary support for decision making about sustainable innovation on the university campus. Making the campus a reputable technological showroom of every aspirational clean energy, climate adaptive and circular innovation on the TU Delft campus and beyond.