Autor: Meike Tilebein

The ongoing digital transformation is changing work and production environments of companies. In addition, a demand-oriented development and efficient use of employee skills are becoming ever more important for success. Thus, there is a need for new decentralized and situationally adaptable solutions that enable self-organized learning paths and informal competence development. This paper presents challenges of collaborative competence development and solutions for IT-supported self-organized learning paths at different organizational levels and shows project examples from the textile industry.

In the apparel industry, with demanding customers and an oversupply of products and shopping options, interactivity and individualization offer important opportunities for differentiation. However, digital business-to-consumer interactions have so far been limited to product configuration and viewing. This paper presents new, digitally supported approaches to integrate the customer into the collection development process of the apparel industry.

Due to increasingly specialised, diverse and also new competencies and competency profiles it becomes progressively more difficult to interpret educational achievements and to match requirement profiles with the competencies of individual persons or groups. The computational support with regards to keeping the information up to date, communication, search and analysis is limited if the competencies are described in natural language only. Thus, it seems advantageous to model competencies in a formal and machine-readable specification language. The following article suggests the notion of a generic formal syntax for learning outcomes. We outline how this would allow expressing intricate learning outcomes in a machine-readable ontology and their further processing with the Linked Data- and Semantic Web-approaches.

The ongoing digital transformation brings pressure to adapt, but also potential for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the textile and clothing industry. High investment costs for new technologies, insufficient employee qualifications and a lack of standards are examples of obstacles that explain the reluctance of many SMEs to digitalize. There is therefore a need for SME-specific information, both in terms of possible solutions and specific implementations, as well as support for the initiation and realization of implementation projects. The competence center “Mittelstand 4.0-Kompetenzzentrum Textil vernetzt”, which is funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), is intended to meet these needs, illustrate the potential of digitization and networking, and show SMEs how to get there.

Industrie 4.0 with the digitisation of products and processes offers companies a large pool of information for process optimization. In many cases these information cannot be used directly in the textile industry, as raw materials are subject to natural fluctuations and the influencing factors and interactions of many product and process parameters are only partially known. In this contribution, an approach is presented that combines information from production with the experience of the employees and thus supports product and process optimization. The approach is based on the machine learning method “Case-Based Reasoning”.

Lifelong learning is an elementary part of the knowledge society and of high importance for industries and societies facing digitization (Industry 4.0). This comprises individual opportunities for the employees as well as competitive advantages for companies. Two concrete solutions for textile and clothing industry will be presented here: on the one hand a sector wide offer for vocational training and on the other hand an adaptable IT based learning method enabling learning in the workplace. Both solutions show cutting edge concepts, technologies and didactic.

Collaboration in dynamic networks enables in particular small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to combine own resources and competences with complementary services of partners in order to improve competitiveness and to distribute risks. However, for the organization of setting up, efficiently operating and eventually also dissolving such networks, SMEs often lack necessary capabilities and human resources. Within this article, a methodology for network management is presented which comprises SME-suitable and easily applicable methods that significantly support efficient network management. The success of the methodology is illustrated with an example from the networked development of an innovative motorcycle helmet.

The ongoing demographic change leads to an increasing lack of highly skilled workforce which affects especially R&D driven organizations. In order to counter this effect, organizations tend to cooperate and form alliances and networks. This way they can pool their resources in interorganizational teams and gain access to complementary skills. On a micro level, the success of cooperations thus strongly depends on the success of the respective interorganizational teams. While traditional diversity research focuses on benefits and risks of heterogeneous teams within one organization, interorganizational teams are faced with additional challenges regarding diversity. In order to identify management issues and to gain a comprehensive overview of the relevant diversity dimensions and their complex interactions, we explore different perspectives on interorganizational R&D teams and integrate them into a framework for further research.

Through their diversity of competences and knowledge, heterogeneous new product development teams have a high potential for innovativeness. On the one hand, team diversity helps to deal with complex tasks and to improve the development of new products. On the other hand, a high level of diversity can lead to communication and cooperation barriers within the team, obstructing teamwork and hence hindering creativity and innovativeness. Therefore, finding the right constellation in this conflict between diversity and communication - exploiting the benefits whilst avoiding the hindrances - contributes to helping develop the full potential for innovation. This paper describes the different influences of diversity on the innovativeness of NPD teams and gives practical implications for managing heterogeneous teams.