Alex Alblas is an Associate Professor of Accelerating Innovation and Organizational Learning Processes in the Innovation, Technology Entrepreneurship & Marketing (ITEM) group of the School of Industrial Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology. Alex’s research focuses specifically on understanding and optimizing organizational learning and knowledge flows between people, departments, and organizations to accelerate innovation. Accelerating innovation refers to speeding up the improvements in product and process innovation performance (e.g., project cycle time, product quality, cost) by gaining experience during the launch of new products.

Alex strongly believes it is vital to study how organizations can learn, adapt, and respond to changing market and technological conditions, and global challenges, by innovating as quickly as possible because the time to address these challenges is limited. He is interested in operational innovation and organizational learning practices 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 principal investigator, he investigates together with a team of researchers the practices in which product development, manufacturing, and customer service processes enable improvements in project cycle time and machine availability.