A conceptual model for organizational competences

Abstract

Organizational competences are one of the main assets of companies. Models of these competences would allow for systematic reasoning for exploring technological innovations, enabled by combining and transposing organizational competences. Today, the literature linking organizational competencies to engineering design and systems engineering remains limited. In particular, a generic modelling approach for organizational competencies for engineering design and systems engineering seems to be missing, although first frameworks have been proposed for specific purposes. This paper presents a generic conceptual model of organizational competences. The objective is to link technology, product, and systems development with the corresponding organizational competencies and their future evolution in order to allow for a joint design of competencies and technologies, products, or systems. The conceptual model provides the basis for a competence combination framework which allows for modeling competence combinations in an organization. Finally, we validate our conceptual model using a case study from the automotive industry.