Management of Technology & Entrepreneurship Institute

Ling Zhou Awarded 1st Prize in the 4iP Council Research Competition

Published:02.03.21 — Ling Zhou, a PhD student at the Chair of Innovation and IP Policy (IIPP), has been awarded 1st Prize by the 2020 4iP Council for the paper “Patents and Supra-Competitive Prices: Evidence from Consumer Products”, which she coauthored with Prof. de Rassenfosse

Covid-19 and disruption of innovation processes

Published:09.02.21 — Prof. Dominique Foray participated in a debate on Forum RTS to discuss how crisis create innovation opportunites in certain domains.

Building Sustainable Products – Creating Lasting Impact

Published:08.02.21 — In the second edition of the master’s course Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Engineering (IEE) – jointly offered by STI and CDM – students responded to industry challenges, building prototypes in teams and analyzing the viability of businesses. Under this year’s theme of “Sustainable Technology” six teams of 3-5 students competed, each developing a product prototype, a business plan, and an impact assessment for at least one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) outlined by the United Nations.

Nomination of the new directors of the doctoral programs EDFI & EDMT

Published:05.02.21 — The College of Management of Technology is pleased to welcome one new director for its doctoral programs: Prof. Pierre Collin-Dufresne for the Doctoral School in Finance (EDFI). Prof. Thomas Weber's directorship for the Doctoral School of Management of Technology (EDMT) has been renewed for a second term.

Meeting Michael Mark, PhD Student in Operations, Economics & Strategy

Published:01.02.21 — Michael Mark, joined the team of Prof. Thomas Weber in 2017 to pursue his studies and obtain his doctorate this year. He tells us about his experience so far.

Is Research Competition More Innovative than Research Collaboration?

Published:28.01.21 — At HICSS 54 in January 2021, Prof. Weber compared the incentives for companies to innovate when they can either cooperate or compete in their research efforts. The main insight of the accompanying research paper is that—all else equal—competition tends to provide a very strong motivation to create high-quality innovation. When collaborating, firms are not subject to the strong motivational force of an R&D race, so that they tend to lose the incentives to make their products great. In the context of the recent pandemic, these findings suggest that encouraging competition between different innovators and providing good patent protection are important factors to help firms strive for the best possible vaccine quality.

Venture competitions could help spur the cleantech revolution

Published:26.01.21 — Matthias van den Heuvel and Prof. Gaétan de Rassenfosse present in their latest article how venture competitions could stimulate green innovation in Switzerland.

A 'blockchained' patent system

Published:25.01.21 — Prof. de Rassenfosse and Dr. Kyle Higham have just published a paper in Government Information Quarterly about what a patent system based on distributed ledger technologies would look like.

EPFL student creates a new language-analysis program

Published:12.01.21 — Jonathan Besomi, a Master’s student at EPFL, has developed a program called Texthero that lets users generate representations of textual data with just a few lines of code, thereby simplifying the analysis of natural languages.

Optimal Mating of Precision Components in Manufacturing

Published:07.01.21 — In the January 2021 issue of Operations Research Letters, Prof. Weber presents a new method for robustly matching random parts with the smallest possible error. The method is useful for selective assembly systems typically employed in high-precision assembly such as in the watch and automotive industries, where the input tolerances often exceed the allowable output tolerances. For example, when assembling a simple electrical oscillator, its resonance frequency depends on the characteristics of the capacitor and inductivity in the circuit, both of which may be subject to uncontrollable variations. To still achieve a low-tolerance resonance frequency, it is possible to group the constituent parts into multiple bins, each with smaller variations, to then match the parts among corresponding high-precision matching classes. Prof. Weber’s results provide a solution for how to bin the assembly parts optimally, minimizing the maximum absolute deviation from a given criterion (such as the resonance frequency of the electrical oscillator in our example).