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

A value chain is a chain of activities that an organization performs in order to deliver a valuable product or service for the market. The concept comes from business management and was first described and popularized by Michael Porter in his 1985 best-seller, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance: "The idea of the value chain is based on the process view of organizations, the idea of seeing a manufacturing or service organisation as a system, made up of subsystems each with inputs, transformation processes and outputs. Inputs, transformation processes, 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 strategies paradigm developed as early as 1979. The appropriate level for constructing a value chain is the business unit, (not division or corporate level). Products pass through activities of a chain in order, and at each activity the product gains some value. The chain of activities gives the products more added value than the sum of added values of all activities. On the other hand, the value chain framework quickly made its way to the forefront of management thought as a powerful analysis tool for strategic planning.

University research groups are atypical organizations that produce scientific knowledge and form doctors. Thus, their strategic planning can also be based on a value chain. However, generally speaking, research groups at universities do not use this tool. In this context, it is worth mentioning that EIDOS research group has been developing its own management system. So far, we have defined our process map, the related procedures, indicators, and other management tools. In fact, our management is inspired by the excellence spirit of the EFQM model. In this context, we have defined our chain value, where our key indicators have been established. Additionally, the as-defined value chain is extremely useful to identify doctorates as an interest group. In fact, doctorates play a double role 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 other research groups, as a useful tool for strategic planning as well for the identification of the interest groups, focussed on the special role of the doctorates.