Background: Knowledge of customer needs is a key factor in companies? struggle to develop successful products. Several studies illustrate that the main reason for failure in product development is lack of customer understanding. Lately considerable changes have occurred. Large-scale mass production is continuously being replaced by customer orientation, especially in the high technological market.

Background: Companies and organizations of today spend large amounts of money on IT-based business solutions. Such business solutions normally include business- consulting and software-creation (IT-related services). Due to the rapid development of the technology within this field of business the IT-customers find it difficult to select among potential suppliers on objective grounds.Purpose: To increase the understanding for the professionl approach of the people involved in the sales- and purchase process of IT-related services in a business-to-business context. The study is taking the buyers'as well as the sellers'perspective into account when analyzing the process. Method: The empirical findings were collected from eight companies in Linköping and Stockholm.

This essay deals with the principle of surprise warfare and its development as well as the adaptation of military action that had to be made to surprise the opponent in the modern era.The concept of surprise is divided into its components in order to clarify what is required to implement a surprising maneuver, to understand the complex concept and form a theoretical framework for gathering facts in the case study.Development and adaption are demonstrated by a comparative case study where Pearl Harbor illustrates an example of historical surprise and Operation Desert Storm illustrates a modern surprise. The product will then be analyzed in order to detect the development and how military conduct is forced to adapt in order to carry out a surprising maneuver. The results shows that the military action of performing a surprise attack has had a major development and is now carried out in a different stage of the attack..

Modern technology and fast development of heat pumps, the hunt for savings in energy consumption and the strive for environmentally friendly energy sources, convenience, and financial profit, have made heat pumps a reasonable alternative for the heating of houses.When the heat pump starts it will consume a considerable amount of current, which may result in a short-lived voltage-drop if the power grid is weak compared to the start-up current.The company Fortum Distribution which owns and administrates electrical network is interested in an investigation that deals with heat pumps affect on the quality of electricity.The purpose of this investigation is to study fast electrical fluctuations (flicker) as a result of start-up currents for single as well as multiple heat pumps on the same electrical station and from this evaluate whether there will be any problems installing heat pumps..

This thesis focuses on the testing activities at the stages of development and change regardingintegration brokers. The study aimed to examine the overall challenges that exist regarding thetesting activities within this context, and the thoughts towards the development method testdrivendevelopment (TDD). TDD emphasizes high level of test coverage and where the testprocess is well integrated with the development process. To seek answers to our question weapplied qualitative interviews with companies and respondents to try to understand the globalchallenges that are related to this work and processes. The main conclusions presented in thisstudy is that the overall challenges are involving and educating project participants in the testingprocess activities and the contributory effect test have on the end product.

ABSTRACT System development has become more and more concentrated on development for the Web and this has resulted in larger target groups. It will most surely continue to be so considering that the Web will be the infrastructure of business and services in the future. A big target group involves that the owner of a system can earn a lot of money from the paying users, but that assumes that the system can meet user needs. If a system on the Web does not satisfy the user?s demands then they will use the competitor?s system instead because it is only a mouse-click away.

This Master of Science thesis is conducted at the faculty Integrated Product Development at theRoyal Institute of Technology and in cooperation with EssNet Interactive AB, both situated inStockholm. In the report the final results and the road to get there is described as well as thedesign process and how the process is used to obtain the goal of this thesis.The author of this thesis has developed the design and the function of an interactive videoterminal (IVT) and by using semantics created an encouraging gaming design. The projectspurpose was to change the anonymous withheld shape and produce an experience of gamingmachine that has been absent. The work was aimed to answer the question: How does oneproceed to develop the IVT and by using semantics creating an understanding of gamingmachine?In general the author wants to show that small changes, with the help of design and its signals,can completely change the overall picture of a product.

Augmented reality is a technology thatcombines the perception and interaction ofvirtual objects with the real world. Itcan allow a user to visually see computergenerated models and informationinteracting with the real world through ahand held device such as a tabletcomputer. This opens up a range ofpossibilities, especially in theconstruction sector. A construction siteis permanently changing and the need forprecise and updated information iscrucial. The ability to enhance the realworld with virtual objects and informationmay make many plans printed on paperabsolete.This report describes how workers in theconstruction sector would benefit fromusing augmented reality on a tablet innumerous situations and the technologyneeded to achieve AR on a tablet.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how social procurement can be a further development of public-private partnership. This is done with interviews and a case study of the social procurement Mitt Gröna Kvarter and its labor effort Boendebyggarna. The theoretical framework used in the thesis consists of public-private partnership and corporate social responsibility. It tries to answer the following questions:What does this social procurement mean by the concept of public-private partnership?What does this social procurement mean for the participants involved?How can social procurement be seen as a further development of public-private partnership?The thesis uses the theory development around the concepts of public-private partnership and corporate social responsibility and shows that social procurement does indeed have similarities to public-private partnership and could very well be a further development of it..

Abstract Title: A conjoint analysis of packaging attributes. How can the attributes of a product?s packaging best look like to attract the consumer? Authors: Linda Granberg & Helena Niklasson Supervisor: Jan Svanberg Department: School of Management, Blekinge Institute of Technology Course: Bachelor?s thesis in Business Administration, 15 credits Purpose: The purpose is to find out how visual and technical attributes on product packaging affects the consumers tendency to want to buy the product. Method: Conjoint analysis and a quantitative survey. Results: When developing a package for a food product we?ve reached the conclusion that it is most important to have clear product information on it. The consumer wants it to be simple and easy to use, the people under time pressure seeks product with new technology which can save them time..

Safety, its a word not commonly associated with elderly people living alone. There is however a device that is supposed to bring safety, and enable elderly people to continue living in their present household - an emergency dialer. However these devices does not serve their own purpose in terms of design. Thepurpose of this study is to create an emergency dailer that everybody would want to put on their wrist or bedside table. The market for these devices have looked the same for the last twentyfive years, despite of society´s advancements in both design and technology.

This report is part of a Bachelor?s degree corresponding to 15 creditsat the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. The work hasbeen carried out by Max Wikander, author of the report, supervisedby Lanie Gutierrez-Farewik and Erik Dijkstra.Gait analysis includes measurement, characterization and assessmentof human movement and is used to assess kinematic or otherabnormalities during gait. Center of rotation and the axis of rotationof a joint are fundamental parameters in motion analysis. However,the ability to create individualized analysis is limited by the lack ofaccuracy when these parameters are calculated.

The company System Andersson is developing systems for controlling materials and production in industries. They want to add a new service, where parts of those systems are accessible through cell phones.In this paper we are investigating which technology are best suited for this kind of application. And then we describe how we are developing a prototype fort this application, based upon that technology. After investigating technologies such as Java ME, Microsoft Silverlight, and web applications we settled upon building the system as a web application, customized for a mobile environment.To build a web page which is readable by many different cell phones we use the markup-languages which are developed for cell phones. We put much effort in reading about the standards and recommendations for the mobile web, produced by the organizations W3C and OMA.

This report is part of a Bachelor?s degree corresponding to 15 creditsat the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. The work hasbeen carried out by Max Wikander, author of the report, supervisedby Lanie Gutierrez-Farewik and Erik Dijkstra.Gait analysis includes measurement, characterization and assessmentof human movement and is used to assess kinematic or otherabnormalities during gait. Center of rotation and the axis of rotationof a joint are fundamental parameters in motion analysis. However,the ability to create individualized analysis is limited by the lack ofaccuracy when these parameters are calculated.

Current technology offers many possibilities for remotecommunication. Nevertheless, people with cognitive and communicativedisabilities have limited access to common communication technology like textmessaging via a mobile phone. This study is part of the project Text messagingwith picture symbols - a possibility for AAC users and people with cognitiveimpairments. Semi structured interviews were used to investigate three menand four women?s experiences of using Windows mobiles with adaptedfunctions for text messaging.