Theyare the present

IMPLEMENTING SUSTAINABLE INNOVATIONS: ACTORS AND INTERACTIONS IN THE ASPHALT PAVING SECTOR

Angie

Lorena Ruiz Robles

Joanne Vinke-de Kruijf, Joao Santos, Leentje Volker, André Dorée Construction Management and Engineering, University of Twente, Netherlands

Introduction

▪ The implementation of sustainable innovations in the asphalt paving sector is slow, uncertain, and more challenging than expected despite being eagerly promoted by governments.

▪ Knowledge gap: in the engineering innovations field poor attention is given to the steps of the process and usually a single actor perspective is adopted (engineering firms).

▪ Objective: provide an understanding of the process that leads to the implementation of sustainable practices in the asphalt paving sector. Specifically, it aims to identify the stages required and the actors involved (including roles and interactions).

Main theoretical concepts and methods

▪ System Innovation looks at innovations from a system perspective, emphasizing interactions among the elements of the system.

System of interest: asphalt paving sector.

▪ Concepts from the Multi-actor perspective (MaP), innovation process and roles in innovation to define the set of elements of the system (see Table 1).

▪ Methods: the Netherlands as a case study, interviews and documents review for data collection, and Codebook thematic analysis

Findings

▪ The innovation process is triggered and shaped by national sustainable goals (climate-neutral agenda) and economic factors.

▪ Assessment criteria in the testing and validation stage are conservative, unharmonized, and unclear.

▪ Decisions in the process are made from a project perspective

▪ The public sector’s influence in the process is substantially high (main framework setters, evaluators, and consumers).

▪ The role of the evaluator is not entirely fulfilled, next to assessing innovations they should re-design the assessment criteria to help the system adapt.

▪ The coordinator's role is underestimated.

▪ There is awareness of collaboration, but communication and cooperation initiatives could be improved.

Discussions and Conclusions participation in the stages.

▪ There is a lack of system perspective in the sector. It is still anchored in a project perspective, and as a system, it should have a common goal: make the system more sustainable. The sector should evaluate how close the sector is to fulfilling the common goal instead of evaluating innovations separately in each project.

▪ The public sector has an enormous impact on the innovation process and the dependency of the private sector on the public sector's actions is significantly high. This arises the question whether the roles of framework setters and evaluators should be played by other actors.

*Contact: a.l.ruizrobles@utwente.nl

Meso-scale description of wet powders for industrial scale modelling

Keywords: Powder, Liquid bridge, wet granulation, DEM, Coarse graining

R. Saghafian Larijani*, V. Magnanimo, S. Luding | University of Twente, Netherlands

Introduction

Wet granulation is an important process in various industries, including chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Modelling this particulate process in industrial-scale can help us optimize the process efficiency and product quality, without wasting material and energy as happens in trial-and-error experiments However, numerical modelling of such processes with millions of particles is very computationally expensive.

Coarse-grained particles (CG-DEM))

Scaling rules

Increase in the computational efficiency of the industrial-scale DEM simulations

Research questions

RQ1: What upscaling approach can we use to decrease the computational cost of the simulations?

RQ2:What is the effect of process and material parameters on the properties of the final granules?

General plan

Making sense of tensions and equivocalities in digital transformation journeys of asset management organizations

Ruth Sloot, Hans Voordijk and Leentje Volker ConstructionManagement&Engineering,FacultyofEngineeringTechnology,UniversityofTwente,Netherlands

Digital transformation for data-driven asset management

• Digital technologies offer enormous potential for improving management and maintenance of utilities and infrastructure assets

• To capture this potential, asset management organizations must undergo digital transformation, which is challenging.

Why are asset management organizations struggling with digital transformation?

• Digital transformation programs consist of multiple, related, digital innovation projects that involve various communities of actors that must work together.

• These actors often hold different and competing understandings of the purpose and motivation for the digital transformation that highlight the high equivocality present. This particularly applies to asset management organizations since they operate in pluralistic settings.

• Little is known about what is equivocal and why this emerges in practice. In our study, we advance understanding on equivocality and how it is experienced by digital innovation managers in asset management organizations undergoing digital transformation.

• Methods: Qualitative, longitudinal single-case study, spanning 38 months

Key findings: Three categories of equivocality

Scope Needs Priorities

Description Boundaries of digital innovation projects are blurry and disputed. Users are diverse and find it difficult to articulate and agree on their needs.

Example "Should we make it work technically,orletitworkproperly? Someonesaysitworkstechnically, butdoesithelpus?Itwasquite unclearwhatthepurposewas.If youaskdifferentpeople,the answermaybedifferent.But,if thequestionis,isitusable?Then theansweris:notyet."

"We do not know what the information needs are for the maintenancephase.Wetriedto inventorythem,butweweren’t abletobecauseofcapacity problemsatthedistrict.Butnow we know that the district itself is busywithinventoryingitsown information needs."

Implications for asset management organizations

Digital innovation projects are highly interdependent, making it difficult to make sense of their relationships and determine their prioritization.

"Onthefirstpointwehaveaclear disagreement.Iunderstandthat youapproachyourworkbasedon assetmanagementprocesses.I alsothinkthattheseareallthings thateventuallyhavetohappen.I justthinkthatwedon'tdothings intherightorder,andwedon'tget aproductthatwecanuseand implementonprojects..."

• Sensitivity towards equivocality could help provide more appropriate responses to challenges rooted in confusion and conflict.

• Clarity on values, preferences and priorities is key to resolving equivocality.

Contact details:

Scope Equivocality

Priorities

Equivocality Needs Equivocality

Water scarcity and smallholders

Towards sustainable, efficient, equitable water use

Han Su (h.su@utwente.nl)

Supervisor: Maarten S. Krol, Rick J. Hogeboom

Multidisciplinary Water Management (MWM), ET, UTwente

Why smallholders

▪400 million farms are operated by smallholders

▪70-80% of smallholders are in water scarce area

▪Smallholders are more vulnerable to water scarcity and climate change

Knowledge gap

• How smallholders are affected by water scarcity

What we have done

▪Analysed linkages between SDG 2 on Food and SDG 6 on Water

▪Mapped global farm size by compiling multiple data sources for 2010, showing

• Who, farms belonging to smallholders or large scale farmers

• Where, 5-arcmin gridded cells, covering 56 countries

• What kind, 42 crops and 4 farming systems

• How much, harvested area

What we are heading to

• Quantifying how much water is consumed by smallholders and largescale farmers, respectively

• How smallholders contribute to water scarcity

• Water productivity of smallholders

• How water limits smallholders’ production

Tools

Crop model, hydrological model, optimization algorithm

QGIS, SQL, Python

Future directions

SDG, Climate adaptation

Accepting the neglected: Three new activity systems for utility detection in construction streetworks

Activity theory, construction technology, Ground Penetrating Radar, innovation adoption Ramon ter Huurne (r.b.a.terhuurne@utwente.nl), Léon Olde

Scholtenhuis, André Dorée

Department

of Construction Management and Engineering

| University of Twente, Netherlands

Introducing the research aim

▪ One construction innovation that is both promising and contested is the Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR).

▪ Although the GPR can improve current processes of buried utility detection, its struggles to become part of it.

▪ While this limitation typically leads to the initial rejection of GPR, it overlooks how innovations are flexible and dynamic ideas that may reconstitute practice and reveal new – rather than substituting – structures of use.

▪ A theoretical understanding of how these change processes unfold deserves deeper coverage to help reveal the richer innovation decision-making dynamics in construction projects.

This research investigated how introducing technological innovations to rich innovation contexts might (re)constitute practices and reveal new structures of technology use.

Intervention research through an activity-theoretical lens Interventions with GPR were conducted on twelve construction sites in the Netherlands. We explored the interactions between GPR and construction professionals as they performed their onsite utility detection activities.

The triangular activity-theory framework of Engestöm (1987) was used to map the coping processes of individuals as they were confronted by GPR. This framework helped identifying how dynamics between the various elements of an activity system changed as GPR-induced disruptions and shortcoming (contradictions) within the activity emerged.

Key results: three new activity systems

Tools Subject Object Division of labour Community Rules

The dynamics between actors, their objects, the tools they used, and the roles they assumed changed as GPR addressed and revealed contradictions. This cultivated into three new activity systems, each forwarding an additional or complementary GPR use:

Activity system I: Emerged as the existing tools showed inefficiencies.

Primary contradiction within the tools of the activity system.

Using Ground Penetrating Radar to explore additional utility objects.

Activity system II: Emerged as professionals learned about GPR and rescoped the existing object.

Secondary contradiction between the tools and object of the activity system. Using Ground Penetrating Radar to map the subsoil free-space.

Activity system III:Emerged as the existing tools could not satisfy the existing object.

Secondary contradiction between the tools and object of the activity system.

Using Ground Penetrating Radar to support the existing methods of utility detection.

Contributions to construction management

1. To literature, this research demonstrates how construction innovations with the intent to substitute may fail, but still yield into valuable additional and complementary structures of technology use;

2. The activity-theoretical perspective, in particular primary and secondary contradictions, helps to reveal those uses.

3. To practice, three new structures of GPR use and the pragmatic exploration of innovations in the workplace are forwarded.