Strengthening the Strategic Relevance of HFE Through Linkages to Innovation Management

In 2012, the IEA Future Ergonomics Committee concluded that regarding its business impact the potential of Human Factors / Ergonomics (HFE) is underexploited, building on earlier calls for a more business-oriented ergonomic approach. The value proposition provided to decision-makers was one of the HFE weaknesses identified. For assessing this deficit today, we investigated the links between HFE and Innovation Management (IM) by performing a bibliometric analysis of 54,000 English-language publications from 1999 to 2022 from Scopus and Web of Science. We found evidence of only very few direct links between the domains but ample indirect thematic links ("connectors") between the disciplines, e.g. "performance", "sustainability", and "artificial intelligence" being among the Top 10 in the ranking. We also analyzed the proceedings of the most recent and most important HFE conference in the German-speaking realm, GfA2024, and found that "performance" is not explicitly present on the current HFE research agenda. Building on our findings, particularly on the notion that linkages to Innovation Management can strengthen the strategic relevance of HFE, we propose and present an Innovation-Centric Model of Strategy-HFE Relations. There, we link (Innovation) Management to HFE by building on "human-centricity" as the strategic value proposition and "performance" as the operational value proposition offered to decision-makers.