In days of more interconnectivity of supply chains, competition is considered happening more between different supply chains than only between different single organisations. To be com-petitive and to remain competitive, organisations and supply chains need to change, need to develop new products and processes; in short, they need to innovate.Innovation, just like competition, already takes place along supply chains. This way single or-ganisations can leverage their own resources. Consequently, the question arises what makes a supply chain innovative or more precisely how to measure innovation capability of a supply chain. Whereas innovation capability of single organisations has gained considerable atten-tion in academia, little investigation has been carried out into innovation capability of supply chains. There are few spill overs from innovation capability research of single organisations into supply chains and spill overs from supply chain management namely supply chain inte-gration literature focussing on innovation capability.What is missing is a framework that allows to measure the innovation capability in terms of its maturity for the whole end-to-end supply chain. As a result, the manufacturing supply chain innovation capability maturity assessment framework (MaSCICMAF) is created using a systems approach to supply chains with an understanding of supply chains based on the SCOR model and its supply chain planning level. MaSCICMAF, based on academic literature, is a framework that is built on the idea that innovation capability of a supply chain consists out of individual innovation capability of single organisations and their interactions. Hence, MaS-CICMAF offers are company scoring model and a supply chain scoring model.For validation of MaSCICMAF, the Covid-19 pandemic offered an unexpected opportunity as surviving through Covid-19 and rebuilding afterwards was a dominant topic. In this context, innovation capability of supply chains is extremely relevant. For maximum practical impact of the research, more investigation into which Scottish manufacturing sector needed the most innovation capability building support was carried out. This resulted in the aerospace sector, precisely one Scottish aerospace supply chain, being the subject of application of MaSCICMAF and its field validation. This supply chain’s innovation capability was analysed in a total of six workshops with two companies of the four TIER supply chain and a supply chain delegation group. In a next step, improvement strategies are developed for each company and the supply chain setup. These are based on the future scenario approach to strategizing. For further prac-tical relevance of the research, these strategies are turned into direct policy making advice. Four main areas for changes in policies are identified. These are open innovation support, building more supply chain resilience, changing funding practices, and advice on skills short-ages and education.It must be clarified that there are certain limitations to the present research. MaSCICMAF must be used more in different industries to enable comparison between supply chains as MaSCICMAF only allows relative assessments at present. Derived policy advice should be con-firmed further as it is only built on two of four companies of one supply chain. Nevertheless, MaSCICMAF evidently and verifiably offers to analyse innovation capability of supply chains and effectively create improvement strategies. Hence, MaSCICMAF contributes to academia in a way that it clearly defines which factors contribute to innovation capability of supply chains and more over defines maturity levels which can be used as basis for strategy making to im-prove innovation capability across a supply chain.
Date of Award | 29 Sept 2023 |
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Original language | English |
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Awarding Institution | - University Of Strathclyde
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Sponsors | University of Strathclyde |
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Supervisor | Jillian MacBryde (Supervisor) & Remi Christophe Zante (Supervisor) |
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