Title: Strategies for competition ? a study of the Swedish contact lenses market.Authors: Pernilla AArskog and Annika Lange.Background: As a market gets more mature and the competition increases, it is more important for a company to apply the right strategic perspective. There are four fundamental strategic perspectives for a service-oriented business: a core product-, a price-, an image- and a service perspective. This study is a about service management and take its point from the theories from the Nordic School about strategies for competition, customer value, perceived customer quality and customer loyalty.Purpose: The main purpose with this study is to analyze and evaluate how the actors at the Swedish market of contact lenses should compete to gain further competitive advantages.Method: The study includes four qualitative interviews with two traditional opticians and two Internet based businesses, but also a survey with 106 contact lens users is included.Analysis: In the analyse part of this thesis it was concluded that the traditional opticians conception about their customer not agrees with what the customer evaluate as important. Many of the customers have thought about changing their optician, and besides that do not recommend their optician, and can there for not be categorize as loyal customers.

Today there are many studies that have shown positive results in the treatment of ICT at an early age. The focus of the studies vary, and they target everything from the actual implementation of teaching resources in ICT, to student performance with ICT support. Regardless of the amount of studies on the subject, there is no precise strategy for how to implement, working with ICT, integrate ICT in different subjects, utilizing the hardware and software that is or how it will eventually respond to new technologies. This work will there by focusing on trying to develop a basis for further research and hopefully in the future to develop an ICT strategy at a national level.In order to provide a basis, a comparison was made of ten different schools. The schools were entered into a table showing the similarities and differences .

By the year of 2007, 97 % of all listed companies in Europe had a CSR strategy described on their website. As the concept of CSR during the last decades has increased rapidly in popularity, a need to understand how such a strategy can be implemented has followed. While working with CSR in an integrated manner shows similarities to other popular management ideas, such as Lean and TQM, companies applying to a CSR strategy has been shown to be under higher scrutiny from media and NGO:s. Through a case study this thesis examines how these special circumstances of a CSR strategy makes The Body Shop use organizational control to avoid being subject to scandals due to not fulfilling the promises made to its customers. The results show that The Body Shop's commitment to CSR creates a need for a stringent bureaucratic control system that highly restricts the freedom of action for its employees.

The purpose of this study is to look at the line extensions of the Swedish dairy company Skånemejerier. We have chosen to focus on how trends in ecological products and Functional Food influence the line extensions. The competition in the food sector have made it harder for companies to be seen in the market area and the companies have to make their brands more visible. That is one of the reasons why companies work with line extensions. The study is based on a qualitative approach because we wanted to come closer to our subject in order to establish a greater understanding for the case itself.

This study has been assigned by Bengt Hellman who works at the logistic department at IKEA Torsvik just outside of Jönköping. The task has been to develop a new picking strategy for the Oversize area in the CDC-Warehouse. The reason why IKEA wants a new strategy is because they want to minimize the route length for the forklifts when collecting the orders.By evaluating the current strategies on other areas in the CDC-storehouse, study literature within this subject and look at restrictions for the storing of goods, we have analyzed how the Oversize area works today. We compared the gathered information, to how it should be done according to the literature to be able to work out a new functional strategy.Today, IKEA does not have a working strategy for the oversize area because of lack of time and because all the power has been put on other areas were sales rates are currently higher. This have led to lack of organisation at the Oversize area and items are just put were there is space without first analysing were it should be placed.The strategy that we have worked out and introduced to IKEA builds on easiness of understanding the layout, the employees shall know why an item is placed where it is.

Non-profit organizations gain increasing attention in society but their legitimacy often decrease by scandals in separate organizations. Doctors without borders (MSF) constitutes an exception and has managed to retain their legitimacy. The aim of this study was to examine how MSF built and retained its legitimacy towards institutional actors in their environment, when the branch in general is suffering from a crisis of confidence. In a case study, this was done by identifying the institutional pressures on MSF and examining which strategies MSF uses to handle the pressures. The study was conducted through qualitative interviews with employees at MSF and actors in their environment.

Introduction: The world is changing rapidly and the uncertainty that characterizes today´s society makes companies preparations for the future crucial. Purpose: To examine how CEO:s in small companies look at the future and what kind of preparations they make in order to meet it. Hereby, our ambition is to find out whether there is a difference between companies working in industries characterized by different degrees of stability. Mode of procedure: The purpose of this thesis has been fulfilled by interviews with four CEO:s from industries characterized by different degrees of stability. Result: The companies working in relatively unstable environments tended to be relatively more flexible and have an emergent strategy formation process, whereas companies working in relatively stable environments displayed relatively less flexibility and tended to have a planning strategy formation process..

Technological advancements in information and communication technologies (ICT) have resulted ina need to use ICT in schools. Sweden has actively promoted ICT in schools since the early 1980's.In Japan, 1994 saw the government's first step towards active promotion of ICT in education. In thisstudy, we have compared the strategies used to promote the use of ICT in elementary and secondaryschools in Sweden and Japan. Our findings suggest that a similar 3-step approach was used in bothcountries: 1, infrastructure; 2, effective use of ICT; 3, implementation of ICT. A significantdifference was found in the way the two countries planned their strategies.

Old industrial sites bear witness of the unsustainable industrial developments in the past. Today many of them stand abandoned and empty, old structures lacking function in our present society. We have in this thesis participated in a visionary student competition arranged by IFLA, International Federation of Landscape Architecture by developing a proposal based on a vision of how Stockholm can stimulate a greener development. We have done this by turning an unsustainable industrial site in the city into an ecological node; Arboretum Lövholmen. Our aim is to develop an entry for IFLA?s visionary student competition by creating a new sustainable design for the industrial area of Lövholmen in Stockholm. We have worked with the following research questions: How can we create a visionary design proposal for Lövholmen that promotes sustainable development with the help of ecological design? How can the competition format be a design tool? How can the working process developing a competition entry progress? The competition demands have shaped our working process and functioned as a platform for the structure of this thesis.

The global spread of the Internet has enabled busniesses and consumers in all industries to be better informed. Consequently, the buying process has appeared to become different from what tratditional models implies. As the buying behaviour among customers is evolving, selling companies are responding to this change. This thesis evolves around the consequences that the developing relationship between buyer and seller in business-to-business companies has led to. The topic in focus is the buzzword and phenomena "content marketing" with its marketing and selling strategy.

The specific task of this thesis is to illustrate the complexity of a cooperation between civilian and military entities by examining Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) and their role as an actor among others in the field in a war-torn Afghanistan.By using counterinsurgency strategy as an analytical framework it has been possible to examine the civilian and military contexts closer. Underlying structures concerning the norms and interpretation of reality of the PRTs has been partly revealed. Studies of the PRTs as one significant bearers of "the comprehensive approach", which includes a holistic approach regarding the use of civilian and military capabilities, new conclusions can be drawn on whether a general civil-military approach can be a part of the solution for current and future conflicts. Based on the counterinsurgency strategy, the author has identified three themes as bearing and thus appears through the thesis as a foundation. These are Coordination, Development and Security.

This thesis revolves around NATO?s role in the Ukraine crisis with the startpoint in 2014. Specifically, through conducting a qualitative content analysis of various NATO related material, a study regarding NATO?s security strategy and defense strategy, and the strategies' implications and roles in the Ukraine crisis, was able to be conducted. The purpose was to obtain an understanding of how NATO?s strategy has been interpreted and implemented in relation to the crisis.

The aim of this masters thesis is to examine query expansion. Query expansion is the process of adding new terms to a query to improve the retrieval effectiveness. In this study the baseline query was expanded in five different modes. The first expansion strategy was formulated by the inflected terms as the system does not allow truncation, I have inflected the terms, e. g.

The purpose of this study is to look at the line extensions of the Swedish dairy company Skånemejerier. We have chosen to focus on how trends in ecological products and Functional Food influence the line extensions. The competition in the food sector have made it harder for companies to be seen in the market area and the companies have to make their brands more visible. That is one of the reasons why companies work with line extensions. The study is based on a qualitative approach because we wanted to come closer to our subject in order to establish a greater understanding for the case itself.

This thesis is based on a case study of the City of Stockholm. The study aims to explore the effects on the city's large investments caused by the public reform. Furthermore, the question concerns the character of the impact and if it will affect what type of investments that will be prioritized. The theoretical background is based on Brunsson's ideas about political organizations shifting towards corporate nature, and Almqvist's interpretation of New Public Management (NPM). Moreover, models explaining public management reform, and the main components of corporate shifting, are used.