(653) VALUE CHAIN OF EIDOS, A MATERIALS SCIENCE RESEARCH GROUP: IDENTIFICATION OF THE DOCTORATES AS AN INTEREST GROUP AND DEFINITION OF KEY INDICATORS

摘要

A value chain is a chain of activities that an organization performs in order to deliver a valuableproduct or service for the market. The concept comes from business management and was firstdescribed and popularized by Michael Porter in his 1985 best-seller, Competitive Advantage: Creatingand Sustaining Superior Performance: "The idea of the value chain is based on the process view oforganizations, the idea of seeing a manufacturing or service organisation as a system, made up ofsubsystems each with inputs, transformation processes and outputs. Inputs, transformationprocesses, and outputs involve the acquisition and consumption of resources - money, labour,materials, equipment, buildings, land, administration and management.”The concept of value chains as decision support tools, was added onto the competitive strategiesparadigm developed as early as 1979. The appropriate level for constructing a value chain is thebusiness unit, (not division or corporate level). Products pass through activities of a chain in order, andat each activity the product gains some value. The chain of activities gives the products more addedvalue than the sum of added values of all activities. On the other hand, the value chain frameworkquickly made its way to the forefront of management thought as a powerful analysis tool for strategicplanning.University research groups are atypical organizations that produce scientific knowledge and formdoctors. Thus, their strategic planning can also be based on a value chain. However, generallyspeaking, research groups at universities do not use this tool. In this context, it is worth mentioningthat EIDOS research group has been developing its own management system. So far, we havedefined our process map, the related procedures, indicators, and other management tools. In fact, ourmanagement is inspired by the excellence spirit of the EFQM model. In this context, we have definedour chain value, where our key indicators have been established. Additionally, the as-defined valuechain is extremely useful to identify doctorates as an interest group. In fact, doctorates play a doublerole at research group, both as staff and as clients (using EFQM language).Thus, the work herein presented describes the value chain for EIDOS, which is extensible to otherresearch groups, as a useful tool for strategic planning as well for the identification of the interestgroups, focussed on the special role of the doctorates.