The creation of value is considered the core purpose and central process of economic exchange. Value creation is now conceptualized as shared by both producers and customers, and value is seen as fundamentally derived and determined in use, the integration and application of resources in a specific context, rather than in exchange, embedded in products and manifested as price. The field of research is abundant with publications but these do not fully further the understanding of value creation and co-creation in a way that is meaningful for theoretical development and decision making in business and marketing practise. Without a thorough understanding of the factors characterising value co-creation, the nature as well as content and locus of co-creation cannot be identified. In that case value co-creation easily becomes a concept without substance. Until now, individual publications on co-creation have focused on few or different aspects, have emphasized the process from either the customer?s or from  the firm?s vantage point, have different theoretical approaches and have ignored the complexity in interactions between actors.The purpose of this essay is to analyse how five fundamental aspects of co-creation of customer value are perceived in contemporary marketing literature. Discussing the different views on co-creation, this essay concludes that thoughthere are evident points of agreement, finding one generally valid doctrine of predestination or value co-creation is improbable.

The storm Gudrun in 2005 led to massive windthow damage in forests in southern Sweden. Since then there has been a growing interest in factors influencing wind damage in above all Norway spruce (Picea Abies) stands. Although many other interesting areas still need to be examined. In 2005 there where a lot of stands that suffered different degrees of damage, a lot of these stands weren?t cut, but instead left to grow. The future development of these stands is uncertain and the guidelines are unclear.

Global Software Development (GSD) is based on a geographical distance where teams are spread throughout the world. The related research have for a long time addressed the challenges presented by geographical distances. GSD is basically a necessity for many businesses to use in order to reduce development costs, reduce production time and to maintain high quality. The study aims to investigate the relationship between the reality of a specific maintenance project. Thus, our research question: How do distributed maintenance teams experience temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distances? To achieve the purpose of the study, we chose to perform a case study of a global consulting company which recently started a new system maintenance project.

The purpose of this study is to examine how educationalists work with bilingual children's language by looking at how and what approaches are used to encourage language development. I have chosen to compare two educational philosophies: Montessori and Outdoor Education, to see how big the differences / similarities are in working methods. The background to this study is that preschools uses various approaches and have different methods to stimulate the children. This means that the conditions for children's language development might look different depending on the preschool they go to. The information used has been gathered through interviews, where I have taken note of educationalists thoughts on their working methods, and through professional literature dealing with this topic.

The purpose of this study is to examine how teachers and pupils experience the use of fictional literature as a tool for language development in the teaching of English as a foreign language. Through surveys and interviews and with Vygotsky?s theory on development in a social environment as a theoretical base, I examine which methods are used to promote language development and also which functions pupils and teachers consider fictional literature to have in the teaching of English. Results show that teachers consider fiction to be among the top methods to get pupils to learn English. Teachers and pupils both favour the use of fun and stimulating reading activities as well as group activities where learning is social to go along with the reading of fiction.

Visby is a city that at first glance is of medieval origins. The popular image of scientists today is that the city was formed in the Middle Ages. According to some of the researchers Visby was formed during the Viking Age, it is based on the basis that the area has been used for a long period. Urban development in the Nordic countries is complex and there are different opinions as to why the Nordic cities emerge. It is important to shed light on the underlying process on why cities are emerging to provide clarity as to why Visby city is emerging.

Abstract In my work, I have tried to define and clarify the conception of sustainability seen from my perspective as a landscape architect. With a basis in literature studies, I have analysed and commented on different applications, contents and meanings of sustainability and endurance. This compilation is based on how a number of writers, researchers and authorities consider the importance of integrating ecological, social and economic aspects of sustainability in city planning. My perspective has mainly been founded on the anthologies and compilations from the 80´s and 90´s where Per G. Berg and Björn Malbert acted as editors.

The use of mobile devices has during the last years expanded and on the market you can see a huge amount of applications. The development of mobile applications differs from traditional systems development since mobility infers that mobile applications can be used in different technological and social contexts. Although previous research has recognized that mobility can present mobile application developers with certain challenges, empirical studies of how problems arise and how they can be handled has thus far been limited. In this study we focused on the requirements engineering process from a development view with the purpose of finding challenges emerging in the development process. The study is based on a qualitative case study that employed semi-structured interviews with both project managers and system developers active in the requirements process.

This study examines how farmers certified by KRAV face proposed regulations on organic soils put forward by KRAV economic association among others, and how they are affected economically. These soils are, from an environmental perspective, interesting as a target for production regulations as they cause greenhouse gas emissions through decomposition of organic material when cultivated. The regulations advocate that organic soils should be grown with pasture where soil cultivation is only allowed every fith year which implies that possible adjustments of cultivation have to be made in order to fulfill the regualtions. Collection of data have been made through a questionnaire sent out to 574 farmers certified by KRAV. The answers have been analysed using a decision making model and statistical findings suggest that proportion of organic soils, type of production, economic conditions and farmers? goals and values have an influence on whether the regulations and potential cultivation adjustments have been considered or not.

AbstractToday there is an opportunity to reinforce concrete with steel fiber reinforcement. In some cases, completely replace the conventional reinforcement. Replacing conventional mesh reinforcement with steel fiber reinforcement in slabs on ground has shown economic benefits, less crack width and less reinforcement amount.Today there are no Swedish standard for designing steel fiber reinforced concrete, what is there is different international recommendations.In this work, design methods for steel fiber concrete are used according to RILEM and Bekaer Swedish AB's software DRAPRO. For other design methods Eurokod 2 is followed.In this work, the design of slabs on ground that are not exposed by large tension strength been designed. Design of crack-reinforcement and restrictions of crack width have been conducted in three different slabs on ground.The calculations have been performed using only conventional reinforcement and only steel fiber reinforcement, and the results are then compared.The results of the theoretical analysis are summarized in tables that compare the amount of reinforcement, crack width and economic cost.This work showed that the slabs on the ground reinforced with steel fibers provide less crack width with a minor amount of reinforcement.

Denna uppsats är skriven inom det nationalekonomiska fältet kulturekonomi och behandlar faktorer som påverkar antalet museibesökare och konsekvenserna av införandet av fri entré. År 2005 genomfördes en reform som medförde att ett flertal statliga museer införde fri entré (vissa museer redan våren 2004). Eftersom inträdesavgifter är en faktor som styrande lyfter fram som en viktig förklarande faktor till antalet och sammansättningen av museibesökare har frientréreformen och dess samhällsekonomiska konsekvenser en central roll i uppsatsen. Utifrån ett datamaterial från Kulturrådet och Statistiska Centralbyrån genomförs två multipla linjära regressioner, en per år samt en över tiden. I dessa regressioner testas olika förklarande variabler som kan tänkas ha en påverkan på antalet museibesökare.

The present study deals with the importance of play for children's learning in preschool. The purpose is to investigate the importance of play for children's learning in preschool from a pedagogue?s perspective. The study is based on two issues: How does the pedagogue´s who were interviewed reason about the impact the play has on children's development? How does the pedagogue´s approach to make play a learning situation? The empirical data is based on semi-structured interviews with four preschool pedagogue´s.

Background: The development of the Swedish demography is one of the most important social and economic changes ever in Swedish history. Society as well as business is facing an age chock since almost every other company owner is over 50 years old. The complexity of managing a successful succession is pointed out as a major threat to the Swedish economy by the organization Svenskt Näringsliv.Purpose: The purpose with this master thesis is to identify and analyze critical success factors for a successful succession from a going concern perspective.Research method: By using the strong aspects from the quantitative as well as the qualitative method, high level of order and systematic could be reached, without loosing too much details and depth in this particular research. The empirical data was gathered by a digital survey sent to 3000 companies. The quantitative research was complemented by 6 qualitative interviews to increase depth and reliability.Results: The study shows that there is a great incongruence between the expected problems associated to the succession and the actual outcome.

Denna uppsats undersöker effekterna av första generationens biobränslen, såsom bioetanol och biodiesel, på jordbruksprodukters prisnivåer både inom länder och internationellt ? samt dessa prisers vidare påverkan på svält i utvecklingsländer. En enkel sektormodell för utbud och efterfrågan, uppdelad i tre delmarknader, utnyttjas först för att illustrera och förklara biobränslens grundläggande kvalitativa priseffekter på jordbruksmarknader. Andra forskningsstudiers och modellers kvantitativa uppskattningar av samma skeenden granskas och vidareutvecklas. Den relativa andel hos senare tids prisstegringar (den så kallade ?matkrisen?), vilken kan tillskrivas biobränslens effekter, skattas med försiktighet: min uppskattning blir att i storleksordningen 10 procent av de samtida prisökningarna beror på biobränslen, med viss variation för enskilda produkter.

Currently many organizations are transitioning from the traditional approach to the agile approach regarding systems development methods. It is evident that research has mainly focused on smaller organizations transitioning, whilst less focus has been given t0 larger organizations. We find this interesting and the purpose of this study is to gain a deeper and broader knowledge concerning the following research question: How is system development work affected by a change from traditional system development methods to Scrum in large global organizations. We also investigate how Scrum can be adapted to complex projects with an internal client. The study is based on a case study, which takes a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews for information gathering and was conducted on a major Swedish telecom company.