Zoe Szajnfarber

George Washington University

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Research Trends

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Annalisa Weigel

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Erica Gralla

American Society For Engineering Education

Jitesh H. Panchal

Purdue University West Lafayette

Ademir Vrolijk

University of Toronto

Taylan G. Topcu

Virginia Tech

Anthony Hennig

George Washington University

Morgan Dwyer

Thomas Jefferson University

Suparna Mukherjee

Narayana Health

Bruce Cameron

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jason Crusan

George Washington University

Cooperative Institutions

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

George Washington University

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Engineering Systems (United States)

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Harvard University

Georgia Institute of Technology

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

University of California, San Diego

Purdue University West Lafayette

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The Opportunists in Innovation Contests

Research-Technology Management (2022)

Ademir Vrolijk Zoe Szajnfarber

Organizations increasingly turn to innovation contests for solutions to their complex problems. But these contests still face a fundamental inefficiency: they need to attract many participants to find the right solution, resulting in high costs and uncertainty. Studies have identified multiple dichotomies of successful and unsuccessful solver types, but these diverge. These studies also offer little guidance on how to attract successful solver types. We introduce the opportunist-transactor dichotomy, bridging whom to attract and how to attract them. Opportunists view the contest as a onramp to a new pursuit instead of a temporary undertaking. Characterizing solvers according to this new dichotomy was a better predictor of success than existing ones: in our context, most winners were opportunists. This type of solver was also reliably attracted by the seeker’s in-kind incentives, unlike those described by the other dichotomies. Our insights provide a deeper understanding of participants in complex contests and a concrete lever for influencing who shows up to solve.

Dichotomy

CONTEST

Solver

Problem solver

10.1080/08956308.2022.2132771

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Citations (2)

Enabling Radical Innovation Through Joint Capability Technology Demonstrations (JCTD): The Case of the Internet Routing in Space (IRIS) JCTD

Zoe Szajnfarber Annalisa Weigel

This paper analyzes the case of the Intern et Routing in Space (IRIS) Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD) as a potential model for disruptive innovation in the government space sector. It finds that technologies like IRIS – characterized by a promising yet unproven relatively mature concept, which faces substantial barriers to implementation, but which could benefit from the stability as sociated with a government patron, creates a strong argument for leveraging the government’s position as a relatively coherent, high volume customer, to catalyze disruptive change. The JCTD model, by creating an opportunity to demonstrate the service-oriented utility of the innovation prior to widespread deployment, addresses the common disconnect between technology change and perceived service improvement directly. However, it fails to adequately mitigate the significant administrative overhead (both financ ial and bureaucratic) of collaborating with the government. Key areas where expectations may need to be adjusted in the future are highlighted through the case.

Bureaucracy

Argument (complex analysis)

10.2514/6.2009-6502

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Mechanisms to support changeability during sustainment: Modularity, excess, and operations

Systems Engineering (2024)

Aditya Pratap Singh Zoe Szajnfarber

Abstract Complex engineered systems face protracted design cycles and indefinite lifetimes, leading to discrepancies between expected and actual operating conditions. The field of design for changeability has focused on developing strategies to cope with these discrepancies. Literature has implicitly assumed that future changes can be predicted by system designers, but this assumption does not match observed reality. Often, systems must be modified in unexpected ways to maintain value, limiting the usefulness of standard change mechanisms. To understand how unexpected changes are implemented in practice, we studied the C‐130, a setting where one platform performed many missions, and close air support in Desert Storm, a setting where many platforms performed one mission. Through this examination, we find that excess and operator change are key mechanisms for changeability that have been largely ignored by literature. Excess can enable additions to systems without having to remove or swap subsystems out. It is also a critical enabler of modular changes during the operational phase. Operator changes are non‐form changes driven by system users who change how their systems are used to gain new capabilities rather than relying on changes to the form of the system. This paper also studies the relationship between these mechanisms to shed light on how changeability is achieved in practice, building the foundation for future work to study tradeoffs of implementing valuable excess during design.

Modularity

10.1002/sys.21794

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The impact of technical complexity on the decision to collaborate and combine

IEEE Aerospace Conference (2013)

Morgan Dwyer Daniel Selva Bruce Cameron Edward F. Crawley Zoe Szajnfarber

In this paper, we investigate how technical complexity affects the decision to collaborate or combine. First, we discuss a model that mimics the system architecting process that was used on the National Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). Next, we present a metric that can be used to assess technical complexity and risk during the early system architecting phase of a program. We combine our technical complexity metric and additional measures of lifecycle cost and requirement satisfaction to evaluate a large tradespace of joint and single-agency, single-mission system architectures that we generate with our NPOESS model. Finally, we illustrate how agencies' decisions to collaborate and combine depend highly on agency preference, on the cost of collaboration, and on the final system architecture that is selected.

10.1109/aero.2013.6496898

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Citations (13)

A Framework to Assess the Impacts of Jointness

Morgan Dwyer Zoe Szajnfarber

This paper defines a framework to represent organizational and technical architectures and to quantitatively assess the complexity mechanisms within them. The framework is then applied to the case of the NPOESS program and used to illustrate the relationship between complexity, cost growth, and the concept of jointness.

Source

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Citations (6)

Experiments in systems engineering and design research

Systems Engineering (2017)

Jitesh H. Panchal Zoe Szajnfarber

Abstract Controlled experiments ranging from laboratory experiments to field experiments are becoming increasingly important within systems engineering and design (SE&D) research. Controlled experiments provide unique capabilities for testing hypotheses, and guiding the development of scientific theories, but their potential is not being fully exploited. As the systems engineering research community embraces different research methods commonly adopted in other domains, there is a need for understanding the role and appropriateness of those methods within the research process. While the design of experiments in SE&D research is not unique per se, we contend that aspects of representativeness in the SE&D context pose different experimental design challenges than do the problems typically studied by experimental social scientists. There is therefore a need to translate established practices to the SE&D context, and also belay widely held concerns about the value of experiments in SE&D research. To address this need, the goals of the paper are to discuss the potential role of controlled experiments in systems engineering and design research, to review the benefits and limitations of different types of experiments, and to highlight the key issues in validating experimental studies. The taxonomy and the discussion on validation build on the rich history in social and behavioral sciences, with specific adaptation to the SE&D context. The discussion is anchored in specific examples from the authors’ own research on open innovation in systems engineering.

10.1002/sys.21415

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Citations (21)

Using conjoint analysis to incorporate heterogeneous preferences into multimodal transit trip simulations

Systems Engineering (2023)

Lujin Zhao Zoe Szajnfarber David A. Broniatowski John Paul Helveston

Abstract Urban transportation systems involve thousands of individuals making choices between routes with multiple modes and transfers. For transportation system simulations to produce realistic results, modelers need to incorporate these users and their choices. Choice‐based conjoint surveys provide an attractive solution for obtaining flexible utility models that can be used to predict choices for a wide variety of trips. In this study, we demonstrate an example using conjoint survey data of commuter mode choice in the Washington, D.C. metro area ( N = 1651). We sample commuters who primarily drive and those that take transit. We examine preferences for different types of multimodal trips, including those with intramodal and intermodel transfers. We find that trips involving a bus transfer are the least preferred while both drivers and transit users both value metro similarly to driving. We also find that walking during transit trips is an important barrier, with the travel time penalty for walking being 60% higher than that of time in a vehicle. Our findings highlight the significance of accounting for differences in modal transfer types in transportation system simulations. Reducing arrival time uncertainty was not a significant factor in commuter mode choice, and commuters' value of time was similar across all vehicle types, suggesting that increasing the relative speed of transit modes may only have a marginal effect on commuter substitution away from personal vehicles.

Mode choice

Conjoint Analysis

Value of time

Mode (computer interface)

Sample (material)

10.1002/sys.21670

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Space architecture design for commercial suitability: A case study in in-situ resource utilization systems

Acta Astronautica (2020)

Tristan Sarton du Jonchay Hao Chen Anna Wieger Zoe Szajnfarber Koki Ho

Baseline (sea)

10.1016/j.actaastro.2020.05.012

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Citations (8)

Are Experts Blinded by Feasibility? Experimental Evidence from a NASA Robotics Challenge

SSRN Electronic Journal (2022)

Jacqueline N. Lane Zoe Szajnfarber Jason Crusan Michael Menietti Karim R. Lakhani

Resource allocation decisions play a dominant role in shaping a firm’s technological trajectory and competitive advantage. Recent work indicates that innovative firms and scientific institutions tend to exhibit an anti-novelty bias when evaluating new projects and ideas. In this paper, we focus on shedding light into this observed pattern by examining how evaluator expertise in the problem’s focal domain shapes the relationship between novelty and feasibility in evaluations of quality for technical solutions. To estimate relationships, we partnered with NASA and Freelancer.com, an online labor marketplace, to design an evaluation challenge, where we recruited 374 evaluators from inside and outside the technical domain to rate 101 solutions drawn from nine robotics challenges. This resulted in 3,869 evaluator-solution pairs, in which evaluators were randomly assigned to solutions to facilitate experimental comparisons. Our experimental findings, complemented with text analysis of the evaluators’ comments, indicate that domain experts exhibit a feasibility preference, focusing first on the feasibility of a solution as the primary indicator of its quality, while discounting riskier but more novel solutions. This results in a tradeoff in which highly feasible but less novel solutions are judged as being higher in quality, shedding light into why experts prefer more incremental ideas over more radical but untested ideas.

10.2139/ssrn.4117951

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Citations (4)

How Frustrations About Oversight Can Lead to Inefficiencies in Contractor Work

Springer eBooks (2019)

Samantha Brainard Zoe Szajnfarber

Lead (geology)

10.1007/978-3-030-00114-8_18

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