When comparing the research on service topics to those research activities that focus on material goods, an obvious gap can be observed: While there exists a broad range of models, methods and tools for the development of goods, the development of services has hardly become a topic of scientific literature. An approach for capturing services as an R&D object is presented in the following under the general heading of "service engineering", and an attempt made to systematise the development of services.

Aside from lean management and business process re-engineering, a new management approach for optimizing logistics organization is gaining recognition: supply chain management. An essential precondition to benefit from supply chain management is a structured analysis of the network-specific optimization opportunities. Opportunities are derived from suboptimal inner and cross-organisational business processes and the related material, information and capital flows. The paper describes a supply chain analysis approach and proposes a measurement methodology integrating bottom-up and top-down performance measures as a hybrid balanced measurement approac

Innovation has been widely recognized as the key driver of economic growth. However, in the knowledge-driven economy, the nature of innovation is changing. Both technologies and innovations are becoming more complex as the knowledge content has increased. Due to the amount of different knowledge domains, individual players cannot develop anymore all the competencies necessary to create innovation in the knowledge-driven economy. Successful innovators therefore join to form innovation networks that allow them to source flexibly competencies and to offer innovations that are complete solutions and not just products. The traditional linear model from research and development as a basis of innovations is thus shifting to a model with a wide network of sources and partners integrating complementary competencies. Managing innovation in such a network poses new challenges for companies as they need to adapt their way of working and develop 'networking' competencies. In this paper, success factors are derived that networks and companies need to adopt to create innovation. For the support of the management of such networks, the innovation roadmapping methodology is proposed. Previously only applied for innovation management in individual organizations, innovation roadmapping should be used as a means to identify and exploit ideas and to align the innovation efforts in the network

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