Advanced Automotive Propulsion Systems

In light of existing and anticipated planetary damage caused by climate change, the UK government is working to decarbonise all forms of transport. Therefore, organizations within the transport sector will be expected to adjust their operations towards realizing decarbonised business opportunities. Within a mature organization, such opportunities will initially be viewed as unconventional as they do not adhere to the established organizing standards associated with carbon intensive technologies. It is therefore expected that throughout the lifecycle of a product or service development project, resistance from other employees towards this unconventional opportunity will be encountered. Thus, an essential skill for an intrapreneur (entrepreneurial employee) in such companies is the ability to overcome the resistance from others to an unconventional opportunity.
A key practice for an intrapreneur is representing their opportunity in conversations with others to bring about desirable scenarios such as to acquire financial resources or to change the behaviour of another individual. A conversation can range from a single speech act, e.g., "do it", to an extensive network of speech acts which constitute arguments, narratives, and other forms of discourse. Recurrent conversations contribute to a form of structural coupling between organizational participants in which people are habituated to the conversations that connect them and work to maintain the coupling in the face of environmental perturbation. Thus, in certain conversations, the representation of an unconventional opportunity may be resisted due to the conventions of daily discourse as to what constitutes a suitable business opportunity and an intrapreneur will then be forced to use particular speech acts to overcome this resistance.

The central exploratory question that is addressed in this project is: In a conversation, how are speech acts used by intrapreneurs to overcome the resistance by other employees towards an unconventional business opportunity?
This project will collect data from organizations within the automotive sector and will focus on an organizations resistance to decarbonisation and how intrapreneurs would attempt to overcome this resistance.
This project will adopt an exploratory sequential mixed methods approach.

Impact Summary

This proposal has been developed from the ground up to guarantee the highest level of impact. The two principal routes towards impact are via the graduates that we train and by the embedding of the research that is undertaken into commercial activity. The impact will have a significant commercial value through addressing skills requirements and providing technical solutions for the automotive industry - a key sector for the UK economy.

The graduates that emerge from our CDT (at least 84 people) will be transformative in two distinct ways. The first is a technical route and the second is cultural.

In a technical role, their deep subject matter expertise across all of the key topics needed as the industry transitions to a more sustainable future. This expertise is made much more accessible and applicable by their broad understanding of the engineering and commercial context in which they work. They will have all of the right competencies to ensure that they can achieve a very significant contribution to technologies and processes within the sector from the start of their careers, an impact that will grow over time. Importantly, this CDT is producing graduates in a highly skilled sector of the economy, leading to jobs that are £50,000 more productive per employee than average (i.e. more GVA). These graduates are in demand, as there are a lack of highly skilled engineers to undertake specialist automotive propulsion research and fill the estimated 5,000 job vacancies in the UK due to these skills shortages. Ultimately, the CDT will create a highly specialised and productive talent pipeline for the UK economy.

The route to impact through cultural change is perhaps of even more significance in the long term. Our cohort will be highly diverse, an outcome driven by our wide catchment in terms of academic background, giving them a 'diversity edge'. The cultural change that is enabled by this powerful cohort will have a profound impact, facilitating a move away from 'business as usual'.

The research outputs of the CDT will have impact in two important fields - the products produced and processes used within the indsutry. The academic team leading and operating this CDT have a long track record of generating impact through the application of their research outputs to industrially relevant problems. This understanding is embodied in the design of our CDT and has already begun in the definition of the training programmes and research themes that will meet the future needs of our industry and international partners. Exchange of people is the surest way to achieve lasting and deep exchange of expertise and ideas. The students will undertake placements at the collaborating companies and will lead to employment of the graduates in partner companies.

The CDT is an integral part of the IAAPS initiative. The IAAPS Business Case highlights the need to develop and train suitably skilled and qualified engineers in order to achieve, over the first five years of IAAPS' operations, an additional £70 million research and innovation expenditure, creating an additional turnover of £800 million for the automotive sector, £221 million in GVA and 1,900 new highly productive jobs.

The CDT is designed to deliver transformational impact for our industrial partners and the automotive sector in general. The impact is wider than this, since the products and services that our partners produce have a fundamental part to play in the way we organise our lives in a modern society. The impact on the developing world is even more profound. The rush to mobility across the developing world, the increasing spending power of a growing global middle class, the move to more urban living and the increasingly urgent threat of climate change combine to make the impact of the work we do directly relevant to more people than ever before. This CDT can help change the world by effecting the change that needs to happen in our industry.