The concept of leadership development plays an important role within the modern organization. As a result of the increasing interest in developing leadership competencies, investments in leadership development programs are becoming a common part of business strategies. However, the return on those investments is seldom evaluated. The reason for this is considered to be the complexity created by the many factors that influence leadership but have no relation to the program. This is a case study based on interviews with participants from a one-year leadership development program that was carried out at AB Previa.

The aim of this study was to gain insight into how two enterprises work with competence development and thereby study how the relationship between competence development and workers, employees, look like. The focus was on the workers motives and motivation towards a participation in a competence development course, their attitude to education, and how the transfer of skills gained from the course, into the workplace looks like. Further on, the work situations influence on the workers competence development has been taken into account.In the study, six people were interviewed in the role of either manager, coach or course participant who are employed in two different enterprises in the south of Sweden.The results showed that the participants were motivated by a strive for personal development or that the participants viewed education implementation as a part of the professionalcareer, which has resulted in a positive attitude towards the competence development course. The managers? motive for decisions about education was to change the prevailing attitude among the staff for the better and thereby strengthen the company?s brand. The work situation has encouraged the desire to participate in developmental education as the feeling of control has encouraged the workers to further development.

If one looks at physical planning in Sweden today one can see that while talking about densification of existing development, reduced emissions and careful use of important land, urban sprawl is a fact with development of sheer residential districts in the urban edges and shopping malls in each and every municipality. As sustainable development is an essential goal for physical planning to strive towards, it is worth questioning if the direction of today?s planning will lead to the goal. A sustainable development can be seen as an obvious to goal aim at. In reality the aim means a hard and complex work.

The probiotic bacteria Lactobacillus reuteri DSM17938 was evaluated as a starter culture in cheese production, with the intention to produce a new interesting product within the functional food market. Growth and acidification rate in milk subjected to different heat treatments, as well as supplementation with growth promoting factors or support cultures was measured during controlled fermentations. The results showed that the weak proteolytic activity of L. reuteri could be compensated for by supplementation with 1% casamino acids or 5% MRS broth. Furthermore, a decrease in growth and acidification rate could be seen when using yoghurt culture or Lactobacillus delbrueckii as adjunct cultures.

Organic cotton has been in the medias field of vision for quite some time. This interestalso reflects in a growing awareness in the textile industry where more and morecompanies today offer organic cotton in their product range. With this in mind wequestion whether organic cotton has become a viable commercial product. We alsoacknowledge there is a lacking of understanding the complex problems that organiccotton manufacture involves, for example the huge effort and cost required for a transitionfrom conventional to organic cotton farming.The purpose of this paper was to study how textile, ecology and competition today arebeing combined by companies. We wanted with our investigation to find out whethercompanies in the textile industry use ecology as a competitive advantage.

The project, Flexible Snowboard System, has been carried out by the project group independently and is a module developed for snowboarders, ski rentals and ski schools. The problems of today?s solutions are that they cause the user an inconvenient standing position when riding the ski lift or skating the transportation slope, also mounting, adjustments and disassembling of the bindings are time consuming and brings undesired wear to the screws and screw holes. In addition any adjustments require that the user steps out of the bindings and have tools at hand. Flexible Snowboard System is a universal module which means that it can be assembled with all of today?s snowboards and bindings.

This thesis describes the development ofa linear guidance system suited for NORCAN's aluminium profiles. The work took place at LP Innovation, a small technical consulting company, located in Uppsala. The work started with gathering and searching for information. A lot of the information was found in product catalogs, but my supervisor was also a great source of knowledge, as well as the other engineers at the company. I also had the opportunity to work with the rea lprofiles, to get a feeling and greater understanding how they were supposed to be used. With the use of sketching and CAD, a number of concepts were generated.

In autumn in 2010 the project group came in contact with the travel company Golf Joy in Halmstad. They had been briefed on the problems of their customers had when they travel with their golf bags and contacted Halmstad University for help in solving this problem. When we heard about this idea, we became curious and contacted the company. After a successful meeting, we took the problem with us to the school and began to brainstorm to see how we could solve the problem. The goal was to produce a stylish and functional travel golf bag with the cart and bag in one and launch it in the golf season in 2012.

ABSTRACT:The aim of this essay is to analyze whether the development of the Principles of War in small states´ doctrine has been influenced by the doctrinal development of alliances after the start of an international cooperation.The author suggests that the development of the Principles of War can be understood through theories of doctrinal development. The theory used for this analysis states that small states depend on alliances, such as NATO, and therefore adapt their doctrine to better match the doctrine of the alliance. Since the Principles of War are the foundation of doctrine, such an adaption should lead to an adaption of the Principles of War as well.The analysis will be made using Swedish Army field manuals as a basis. These will be compared to NATO´s, in order to see whether or not Sweden has adapted its Principles of War following its membership of the Partnership for Peace.The results show that today the Swedish Principles of War are more similar to NATO´s than they were in 1982, which suggests that they have been adapted to better match those used by NATO. Although this essay does not analyze the reasons why, the results imply that theories of doctrinal development also include the development of principles of war.

Background: Mass customization has been identified as a competitive business strategy by both companies and academics because of its ability to incorporate the voice of the customer into companies? products and services. Although mass customization may sound appealing, the strategic concept is still developing and firms adopting this business strategy face several challenges. Production concerns are of high relevance since mass customization implies a high level of customer involvement in the product design. Since the areas are closely linked it is reasonable to ask how a mass customization strategy affects production concerns.

This thesis was performed at SverigeGrepen AB. SverigeGrepen is a company that hasone product on the market; a manure fork that is designed to be used for mucking inshavings or peat. The aim of this thesis was to develop a new manure fork that isadapted to be used in straw.The development started with a pilot study where experience of mucking wascollected to be able to understand what and why certain characteristics are importantfor the function and use of the manure fork.A basic concept was developed where the main function was fulfilled, which meantthat a separation between dung and straw could be performed in a way that wasbeneficial for the user.The work resulted in four concepts of how a manure fork could be used in the strawthat can be designed and constructed. The conclusion that the work gave was that allconcepts met the main requirements required by a manure fork to use in straw.However, concept four provides a good visual impression, while its benefits areassumed to be important qualities..

This master thesis has been carried out at Scania R&D at the department for Powertrain Control System Development during the winter of 2010/2011. In the thesis the writer examine and evaluate the existing method for collecting information from the tests carried out during the development of the Powertrain Control Systems software. It also contains suggestions for how a new method that enhance the validation elements could look like.The master thesis uses Vicentes theories of the ecological approach and theories of how knowledge sharing of tacit and technical information works within an organization and between the organization and its customers. First a workplace analysis at Scania R&D is carried out to see how Powertrain Control Systems work and how they test their software. Second a control task analysis, where the aims decided on after the interviews, is compared to the existing method.

GKN Aerospace Sweden (GAS) utvecklar och tillverkar motorkomponenter för både den civila och militära flyg-och rymdindustrin. En av produkterna som GKN tillverkar är en outlet guide vane(OGV), vars funktion är att omdirigera det axiella luftflödet från fläkten. OGVn är den mekaniska länken mellan kärnstrukturen och fläkthuset. Ett viktigt mål är att minska vikten på motorn samtidigt som dess diameter ökar när motorerna blivit allt större.For att lösa detta krävs ett material med hög hållfasthet i förhallande till vikten. Ett examensarbete som föregår detta har utvecklat ett koncept som innefattar en OGV i en viss GKN-utvecklad tekonologi.

The purpose of this study is to give an overview about iron fortification from the view of technique and health. Example of a technical aspect is different iron compounds which are used for fortification like ferrous sulfate, ferrous fumarate and elemental iron. In the aspect of health the big question is if iron fortification can improve the health in reducing the prevalence of anemia. The study focuses on flour fortification with iron in Egypt and Iran and involves a literature study with scientific articles. Also information from WHO (World Health Organization), FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) and FFI (Flour Fortification Initiative) are used.Fortification means an intentionally increasing of the content of micronutrient in foods with the aim to improve the food quality and deliver a nutritional benefit to the consumer.

The most dominating type of company in Sweden is the small-sized business and it usually lacks its own marketing department. The purpose of this paper was to analyze several small Swedish businesses which are specialized in different sectors of the Mechanic/Technology industry but they are similar in terms of having niched products and they are leading companies in the world. The objective was to do research about how small businesses work with marketing despite its lack of resources and capital.This survey has shown that customer contacts, customer relationships and especially for those investigated companies, it was very important to focus on globalization and product development in order to build a Point of Difference..