The Innovation, Technology Entrepreneurship and Marketing (ITEM) group focuses on understanding and improving new business and product development processes within firms, organizations, and institutions in a high-tech context.

Passionate about improving new business and product development processes in high-tech firms

In a marketplace where customers are more aware, active, and value-driven, firms must rapidly conceive and develop new products and services that meet customers' changing demands. As such, firms are not only urged to step up their development efforts, but also to continuously re-examine established methods for new business and product development. This is important because emerging new perspectives on business and product development have changed the rules of the game. With the onset of open innovation, new business and product development is no longer the exclusive playing ground of one single  firm. Instead collaboration with external parties is required to accelerate new business and product development to keep pace with competitors. Moreover, technological breakthroughs in areas such as healthcare, ICT, and mobility require that organizations renew their business models to successfully market new products and services.

ITEM’s research, educational and valorization program focuses on new business and product development processes in all different organizations with a specific emphasis on high-tech products. This perspective is unique in the sense that it covers the entire cycle of development efforts, from the very front end of new business and product conception to start-up and commercialization respectively. Moreover, it combines an industrial engineering and management perspective to capture the complexity and multidisciplinary nature of new business and product development, and deliberately exploits the various competences and forms of expertise at the interface with related engineering disciplines to help businesses improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their innovation efforts. Through this focus ITEM is, as such, not just able to conduct good disciplinary work, but also to connect to the cross-disciplinary research themes of Logistics and Interface, Humans and Technology, Sustainability and Value of Big Data of the department and the strategic  areas of Energy and Health at the university level.

By focusing on new business and product development, ITEM makes an important contribution to contemporary research on the optimization of complex processes, systems and organizations in high-tech industries. This is imperative because in such industries, new business and product development are the main drivers of growth, profitability and survival. Moreover, the group’s research is incorporated in university-wide educational programs on entrepreneurship and innovation to educate the engineers of the future in successful new business and product development.

ITEM’s research, educational and valorization program centers on means for measuring and improving the process of conceiving, developing, and launching new products and businesses. As such it entails all the strategic, tactical and operational activities involved in identifying and exploiting new business and product opportunities, including new service development, business model design and technology commercialization, and new product and service commercialization. To cover all these facets, ITEM focuses on three major research lines that together cover the full spectrum of the new business and product development process: (1) technology entrepreneurship and new business venturing; (2) new product development and management; and (3) new productmarketing. 

ITEM’s scholars are involved in several research projects with national, European, industry and university funding on a variety of new business and product development topics. For these projects, we collaborate not only with researchers in the Netherlands, but also internationally, and with companies like ASML, Philips, and Heijmans or governmental organizations like the European Commission and the Netherlands  Space Office (NSO). The aim of our projects is to contribute scientifically, but also perform research that is relevant and useful for practice.