Including Student Case Projects in Integrated Product and Production Development Research – Methodology Description and Discussion

Within integrated product and production development research, case studies need to be performed for data gathering purposes. Today, there are two commonly used ways to perform this research; observing industry projects or having the researchers perform the projects themselves. The first option can pose data access and IPR issues, and the second option comes with biasing risks. Another approach is to work with student case projects, giving students interesting projects and finding a solution to mediate both data gathering opportunity and biasing risks. This approach has been tested at Linköping University, with students performing projects in the Vinnova funded Production 2030 – Large Scale Production in Mixed Materials project. Two larger student case projects have been performed on the topic of material substitution and mixed material solutions within the automotive industry. In this paper, the method used to include student projects is presented along with identified benefits and drawbacks. Including student case projects in research have shown to be beneficial in research on processes, projects and methodology, but needs to be complemented by data from industry projects and the researcher ́s own work within integrated product and production development in order to create a more reliable analysis with high level of detail.