Title: The customer?s contribution to the innovation-process ? a study of using customers to discover latent needs. Level: Final assignment for Bachelor Degree in Business Administration Author: Robert Klein Supervisor: Agneta Sundström Date: 2014-06 Aim: The purpose of this study is to gain enhanced understanding of what knowledge costumers contribute with in an innovation-process lead by a producer of goods, and how that knowledge is used to fulfill latent needs. The area of research has formerly described which results customer-involvement lead to, but have been scarce in describing how results are produced. Method: From a qualitative onset, a case-study collecting data through observations and interviews capturing customer knowledge contributions, and producer use of fetched knowledge has been conducted. Data has been analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Results have been processed in several steps in which material has been categorized and enriched continuously. Result & Conclusions: Customer-knowledge is broken down into market-knowledge, everyday-knowledge, and specialist-knowledge, which all are significant to a producer of goods.

Innovationsproduktiviteten har blivit allt viktigare i vårt samhälle och ses som en förutsättning för att skapa framgångsrika organisationer. Innovationer springer ur människors kreativitet och initiativförmåga och innebär att omsätta kunskap, kompetens och idéer till praktisk nytta.  Det förefaller som om innovation endast blomstrar under rätt organisatoriska omständigheter. Kärnan i den innovativa organisationen är en kultur som agerar vägvisande med en tro på människan. Nyckeln till innovation blir således organisationers förmåga att förhålla sig till förändring i en ofta kaotisk miljö med människan i centrum. Som ett led i detta arbete behöver organisationer kontinuerligt ta temperaturen för att tydliggöra både den nuvarande och den önskade kulturen.

Introduction In order to foster innovation of medical devices within the healthcare sector, a collaboration project, PUSH, has been initiated including the hospitals managed by the Stockholm County Council. The collaboration aims to capture ideas from employees and turn them into so called ?high-practice? products as well as facilitate the possibilities for medical device companies to try out their products in the settings of healthcare. Collaborations for innovation, comparable to the PUSH project, can be found in both Swedish and foreign regions, but some of them fail to survive due to obstacles affecting the progress of each collaboration. Avoiding the same destiny will be a challenge to the PUSH project.Purpose The purpose is to search for factors affecting organizational collaboration concerning innovation systems for medical device development.

Denna uppsats syftar till identifiera och förklara sambandet mellan belöning, inre motivation, yttre motivation och arbetstillfredsställelse med teamprestationer vid produktinnovation. För att kunna uppnå vårt syfte har vi utfört en surveyundersökning genom telefonenkäter med 69 företag. Vi fann ett positivt samband mellan teamarbete och teamprestationer vid skapande av innovationer. Vi fann också att belöningar ökar chansen för en individ i ett team att bli arbetstillfredsställd vilket leder till en framgångsrik innovationsprocess. Om företag ska lyckas skapa framgångsrika innovationer måste de ge innovatörer incitament i form av belöningar vilket ger upphov till arbetstillfredsställelse och en mer framgångsrik innovationsprocess..

During the past decades the competition for skilful employees has increased and companies and organizations compete to attract the right people. The Swedish municipalities and country councils need to recruit 420 000 new employees before 2020, but have a limited budget to promote themselves as attractive employers. To find a solution, many of the municipalities have started to work with fundamental values to become more attractive employers and to inspire employees to use word-of-mouth to recommend them. There are no empirical studies of how successful this strategy is, and the purpose of this thesis is to show if there are significant correlations between the fundamental values, the employer's attractiveness and word-of-mouth. The results of the study are based on a survey with 1996 answers from employees in three different municipalities in Stockholm, Sweden.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) promotes the Ecosystem Approach (EA). In this thesis it is analyzed how the EA approach could be applied to regional management of coastal areas in Sweden. The aim of this report is to compare management for preserving biodiversity on a landscape level in two regional coastal areas in Uppsala and Västra Götaland respectively. In Uppsala, one of the plans consists of a previous nature reserve and in Västra Götaland, a Regional landscape strategy has been established. The ecosystem approach is used as a theoretical framework in this thesis.

Samhället är föränderligt och påverkas av globala faktorer. Arbetslivet tvingas till kontinuerlig utveckling och anpassning till rådande omställningar. Företag och organisationer måste ständigt förnyas och utvecklas för fortsatt existens. Två begrepp som används i samband med utveckling och förnyelse i organisationer är kreativitet och innovation. Syftet med den här undersökningen var att beskriva och analysera vilka övergripande faktorer som ledare uppfattar påverka kreativitet och innovation i organisationen.

The BSC is widely used mangement tool that is turning the vision and strategy into operational goals. However, after analyzing the criticism received the BSC, it seems af its internal focus, rigidity, static-ism and mechanical mindset limits the company's ability to create a strategy that takes important external factros into account..

Within process or manufacturing industries, the production of goods and services or the products themselves may have negative side effects such as pollution. An important task for environmental policy is to control and limit these pollutions, for example via regulatory measures. Although, the efficiency of such measures vary greatly between different industries and an increasingly important task for environmental policy is then to encourage companies to engage in environmentally motivated innovation. Governments can utilize other measures than regulation to indirectly decrease pollution. This thesis aims to analyze such activities and how it affects the innovativeness of wastewater treatment, refrigeration and automobile manufacturing industries.

The purpose of this study is twofold: First, to inquire how the George W. Bush administration plans to keep America safe from external threats and second ? based on the assumption that neoconservatives have influenced the Bush administration ? examine how neoconservative ideas have influenced this strategy to protect America. The research questions are as follows:What is the content of the Bush administration?s security strategy?How are neoconservative ideas reflected in this security strategy?To answer the first question, the main points of two studied documents were summarized.

Objective: For a long-term and viable economic development to take place in a country it needs to promote creativity and innovation in enterprises. The study applies the process model to study the process of innovation in innovative companies in Sweden. The study also applies the technology commercialization model to indicate the ability of companies to commercialize the technology to the market.Main purpose: The purpose of this work is to study how companies in Sweden proceed with an idea generation and if they manage to commercialize these ideas.Method: This study used a qualitative approach. Multiple case studies & interviews.Conclusion: The innovative ideas in innovative SME:s in Sweden is emerged from randomly events and from systematic developments. Consumer chock is the trigger who draws focus on the idea.

Syfte: Syftet med vår undersökning är att bidra med en bredare förståelse för komplexiteten som ICT kan ge upphov till i framtagandet av nya affärsmodeller. Genom en bredare förståelse vill vi bidra till att förbättra de förutsättningar som ICT kan möjliggöra till för mindre svenska bokförlag på en digitaliserad marknad. Metod: Vi har använt oss av primärdata i form av kvalitativa intervjuer, samt sekundärdata bestående av relevant statistik gällande priskänslighet och benägenheten att vilja läsa e-böcker. För att nå en tillförlitlig slutsats har vi valt att lyfta fram teori som berör affärsmodeller och förändringen av dessa. Slutsats: ICT har viss betydelse hos mindre svenska förlag i arbetet med att utveckla nya affärsmodeller.

The purpose of this study is to examine senior high school students? strategies and reasoning when solving mathematical problems and make a review of the concept problem solving. The purpose is also to examine if the students? choice of strategies are influenced when their mathematical knowledge is improved.The study was conducted in two science classes at a senior high school. All the students were asked to individually solve two mathematical problems.

The financial crisis in 2008, effected companies around the globe and forced them to change their operational strategies, in order to survive. Companies with international links needed to consider external effects and due to that adapt their strategies on a global level. Demands for goods and service were decreasing and companies could only manage the cost during a recession to not face bankruptcy. Organisations need to reconsider their optimal strategy as this will determine their future outcome when managing a crisis as the one in 2008. British Airways - Air Cargo is a global company with an international network which serves about 80 countries, with about 200 destinations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if a dynamic investment strategy on the Swedish asset market can accomplish better returns then a static investment strategy. The dynamic investment strategy is created by incorporating business cycle predictors and firm-level variables to predict future stock returns. The predictive regression is calculated wih 60 months of observation (1999 01-2005 12) and is then used to estimate future returns for 23 months in the period 2004 01 -2005 11. The structure of the regression, with linear functions of ? and ?, goes back to Shanken (1990) and Avramov and Chordia (2005) has had success with the variables chosen.