PhD Position in Operations Management

The Research Center for Operations Management of KU Leuven is seeking a full-time PhD researcher for a project on “New Sustainable Business Models enabled by Digital Product Passports.” The project is funded by Flanders Make, which supports manufacturing companies by encouraging innovative research. The PhD vacancy should lead to a PhD in Business Economics within four years.

Project

The sustainability of a long-living, high-value, IoT-connected mechatronic product is primarily determined by its complete lifecycle and the ecosystem supporting this lifecycle. For instance, it is not because a product can be disassembled that it will be disassembled at its end-of-life. Furthermore, making more sustainable products is not easy, but selling them and making a profit is often even harder. So, to become truly sustainable and remain profitable, manufacturers need to explore new business opportunities that strike a balance between sustainability and economic viability.

The outcomes of this project will allow manufacturers to co-explore new business opportunities that reduce the environmental impact and create value for all actors participating in the value chain. To this end, we propose a method and toolkit for exploring and assessing sustainable business models (SBMs) with a particular focus on the downstream value chain. The toolkit should allow companies and their downstream value chain partners to qualitatively and quantitatively explore and assess new sustainable business models' economic and environmental impact. In this context, data is a critical enabler for new business models.

To foster a digitalized and circular economy, the EU introduced Digital Product Passports (DPP) as one of the cornerstones in the “Eco-design for Sustainable Products Regulation” to create transparency on the product’s sustainability throughout its value chain. The DPP lists comprehensive information about a product, from its origin and composed materials to the components’ disposition and recycling possibilities. These passports are intended to be implemented across various product groups by 2030. Concurrently, many firms are pivoting to new business models for a more sustainable economy, including servitization models such as power-by-the-hour, where revenues come from providing a product’s service and performance instead of selling the product directly. However, it is challenging to price power-by-the-hour contracts accurately, considering the risk and uncertainty of maintenance and repair costs. Adversely, charging too much discourages new customers. Whereas many companies today perceive the Digital Product Passport as a burden, capturing and sharing product-related data can also unlock new business opportunities and sustainable business models or significantly reduce costs. This research examines how and which data collected by DPPs can be used to explore and assess sustainable business models and fairly and dynamically price these servitization models.

Profile

• You have a master’s degree in Engineering, Business Engineering, Data Science, Operations Management, or a similar degree with an equivalent academic level. Excellent (honors level or higher) results in prior studies are a requirement.
• You have a solid, mathematically oriented background and a strong interest in sustainability, operations management, data analytics and data-driven techniques.
• You can conduct independent research (demonstrated, e.g., by an excellent MSc thesis) as well as collaborate well in teams.
• You have excellent command of spoken and written English and are equipped with good communication skills.
• You are willing to participate in seminars and conferences, be internationally mobile and to enroll in the PhD program of the Faculty of Economics and Business, which entails 21-ECTS of relevant coursework. You will also give guidance to students, be involved in teaching activities and in the supervision of exams.

Offer

We offer a full-time contract initially for 1 year with an extension of up to 4 years after a positive evaluation.
The tentative starting date is September 1st, 2025.

Interested?

For more information please contact Prof. dr. Robert Boute, tel.: +32 16 32 64 63, mail: [email protected].

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