Being a servant leader to the NEON consortium, my role is Point of Contact (PoC) to the partners and organisation architect. My role in the NEON project at the surface looks very practical and managerial, with apparent little relation to the research. Still quit some deep research development is happening in the background. My postdoc research continues the doctoral research on radical innovation by ecosystem dynamics.
During my PhD I did participation research in a startup ecosystem on Open Source software development (agile-software development), learning a lot about the required culture to have healthy flow in the agile-software ecosystem. In this case it was the emergent market on social-media tools (see image trend between 2005-2015).
NEON is about two existing markets, one Energy and one Mobility fusing in the transition to zero-emission economy. The transition ecosystem has mature organisations. The postdoc research challenge will be to take over the general dynamics from agile-software development and apply it to agile-science research. My postdoc rol is by participation research and my role in the project allows me to bootstrap the agile-science research method. I’m as such playing a more active role as I did during my PhD and on a more matured domain, replacing the mockups made about Interversity by actual date retrieved via my managerial role.
The integral model that colleagues work on with Floor Alkemade and Maarten Steinbuch, needs input from all the other work packages. Auke Hoekstra as the project lead goes into depth technically, my focus it to go broad to all partners and researchers, as a servant leader to the project. In earlier work my role was called Human Capital Strategy and it also relates to my fellow postdoc Piet van Gool, while I focus on the collective Piet focuses on the job crafting and team building. Every researcher is developing a learning path, with the partners I’m developing a penetration path to focus on the emission goal and navigate uncertainty in a lean-agile way. I’m using the methods developed during my PhD to assist the growth of the ecosystem.