Purpose: During the last years Real Options have been established in many areas of the day-to-day business. Recent literature also tries to address Supply Chain problems with option theory, since an efficient Supply Chain increasingly gains in importance as a significant competitive advantage. This thesis tries to answer the question, if Real Options can mitigate the costs induced by the Bullwhip Effect as one of the major problems in Supply Chains. Methodology: The authors of the thesis used a deductive approach. Based on a theoretical model utilizing Real Option contracts and under the usage of a randomly created dataset the influence of the Bullwhip Effect on the company?s business and financial structure is examined and subsequently analyzed.

Marketing communications have earlier been conducted via traditional channels. Today companies have discovered the possibility of doing much of their marketing communication in cooperation with the web at relatively low cost. This development has led to the ability for small businesses to compete with large companies independent of geographic location. The purpose with this thesis was to examine how small businesses use their website in marketing communications with their customers in the consumer market. In order to reach this purpose we have conducted interviews with five small businesses in different business trade with varying degrees of website usage, located in Piteå and Luleå.

Frölunda-Aspvik Säteri, a company just outside Stockholm within the agriculture and forestry sector, has developed a business idea around countryside tourism as a complement to their existing business. The idea is to offer a high quality and functional way of living in small cottages surrounded by beautiful nature and landscape of cultural importance. There will also be a range of additional activities available such as hunting, canoeing, cycling etc. The project should be done with minimum impact on the surrounding environment and the importance of the ecological system should be at the forefront of all business decisions. At present the company wants to have a better understanding of what the future trends are within tourism, how its business idea fits in with future trends within tourism and how to stay competitive.The purpose of this research paper is to identify the social driving forces that have an impact on people?s lifestyle and choice of holiday destination in the future, and present how these factors affect the travel industry.

Agile as an idea was created in 2001 through the Agile Manifesto with focus on social relationships, communication and flexibility. This was a reaction to the traditional, hierarchical organization with the goal of restoring balance within organizations in the IT business. Today we can see a transit of Agile from the IT-industry to other industries and areas, such as HRM.There is a challenge in attempting to traditionally control a social idea such as Agile, and there is a lack of empirical studies of the organizational context and its effect on the interpretation of Agile in practice. This study is an attempt to connect Agile to the science of business administration.The purpose with this study is therefore to research the organizational contexts effects on the interpretation of Agile in practice, within IT and HRM. Where Agile is established or well known.To fulfill our purpose we chose social constructivism as our scientifically approach, and conducted 12 in-depth interviews.

The aim of this thesis is to develop a new business model for district heating and cooling firms which can contribute to a stabilization of the Swedish national energy system. The business model is developed for a district heating and cooling firm and is exemplified with Fortum Heat. The theoretical investigation around the topic creates a rigid base for following qualitative empirical studies. Osterwalder?s canvas for business model generation is used together with a Casual Loop Diagram to identify a number of business opportunities which stabilizes the national energy system.

Marketing communications have earlier been conducted via traditional channels. Today companies have discovered the possibility of doing much of their marketing communication in cooperation with the web at relatively low cost. This development has led to the ability for small businesses to compete with large companies independent of geographic location. The purpose with this thesis was to examine how small businesses use their website in marketing communications with their customers in the consumer market. In order to reach this purpose we have conducted interviews with five small businesses in different business trade with varying degrees of website usage, located in Piteå and Luleå.

ABSTRACTBackground:To work irregular hours, so called shift work, involves a greater risk to develop bad health compared to work daytime. The society today requires availability 24-hours per day which makes shiftwork necessary. We have to find a way to make shift working people remain at a good health.Purpose:The purpose of this study was to examine the self estimated health of shift workers. This study concerns significant differences between self estimated health and: main reason for shiftwork, possibility to decide what to do at work and possibility to decide how to perform work tasks.Method:A cross sectional study was performed in four companies in industrial manufacturing, printing business and service business in the community of Örebro. 113 questionnaires were delivered and 71 persons filled the questionnaires and returned them, the reply fervency were 65 %.Results:In this population almost 80 % of the participants declared their health good, very good or excellent and no one declared their health as poor.

The purpose of this essay is to identify costs for providing First-line and Second-line support, and then allocate these cost to different goods and services (cost objects) being supported. The thesis also intends to improve the overall cost awareness in IT settings..

I have chosen in my study, to do a comparison between pupils´ expectations of the future, how they would meet adult life or working life after their education. These pupils are ending their programmes during this term. One program is Business and Administration Programme and the other programme is Qualified Vocational Education in Business, which is a post-secondary education and training programme. This investigation is done in Haninge municipality.The purpose of this study has been to investigate if these students´ expectations differ between each other, compared with factors such as age, sex, ethnical origin and different study programmes. Further it has been interested to see how teachers and future employer meet these pupils´ expectations in education or in their planning working life.There have been two other important questions to investigate in this study.

Aim/Objective: The purpose of this paper is to investigate and analyze the early effects that could arise between entrepreneurs and lenders in connection with the auditing requirement, which has now been abolished. Through, empirical data identify the impact from the credit provider?s perspective and small business perspective and then make an overall assessment.Method:The authors are to achieve the purpose for this thesis through the use of both primary and secondary data. Primary data gathered through interviews and secondary data in the form of earlier thesis as well as articles.Result and conclusion: Banks have not prepared for the change in connection with the abolition of the audit requirement. Lenders look at repayment ability as the most important aspect of giving credit.

Learning organizations and organizational development are interesting subjects that does not examine municipal organizations and private organizations an equal amount.  Furthermore, there exists little research on the effects of competence development for individuals in a leadership role within organizations. Because of this, we wanted to examine the impact of competence development in business modeling and how it affected local government activities. Competence development is used by organizations to develop their business and achieve a greater competitive advantage, but does competence development for individuals in a leadership role lead to organizational development? This paper examines competence development in the form of a business modeling course via the Bitstreamproject and the effects that occur within three municipalities as a result of the competence development. By interviewing three participants and four coworkers within different municipalities and studied the data from the Bitstream project, we can not conclude that competence development within business modeling leads to organizational development, only that it exists a tendency for it.

The role of small businesses is fundamentally important for the economic development in countries. Within this context, business incubation is used as an entrepreneurship development instrument to promote and support new firms in the early stage of their existence. However, research in the field tends to disregard the perspectives of incubatee entrepreneurs. The performed investigation is based on interviews with entrepreneurs from two different business incubators at Swedish universities. This study uses a Situated Learning Theory (SLT) as a theoretical framework, to examine the entrepreneur's experience of the learning environment in a business incubator.

Background: Companies with a high level of research, such as biotech companies, rarely generates any profit in the begining. Mostly their history is short and their pipelines usually consists of one or a few products only. Significant for the line of business is also a future very uncertain, where relevant objects of comparison are few. Altogether the facts above makes valuation of Biotech companies difficult. Swedish Biotech companies, compared to their american competitors, seem to be of relatively low value.

Syftet med uppsatsen är att beskriva vilka av de applikationer och intäktsmodeller, som litteraturen rekommenderar, som används av svenska e-handelsföretag och varför de har valt att använda, eller inte använda, just dessa..

This paper aims at assessing the relationship between female and male part-time employment and the business cycle in Sweden during the years 1987?2005 using quarterly time-series data and two alternative indicators of the business cycle. It further aims at determining whether the share of women working part-time has changed over time. Key results include that the relationship between the business cycle and female part-time employment is found to be significant and countercyclical. No significant effect is however found for men.