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..

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.

Öland?s Business Office is on the verge of developing a strategy for the island?s future tourism. Before any work with developing Öland can be carried out, it is essential to gain an understanding of how the place is perceived today.The purpose of this essay is to study the island?s current image and make recommendations for how the place brand could be developed.The methods used are literature studies and qualitative group interviews. The participants have been inhabitants of Öland and returning visitors from the Kalmar region.

Nowadays, the world around us is changing faster and faster, the globalization is increasing and harder competition puts extra pressure on companies to be more innovative than ever before. One of the fastest changing industries is the IT industry where the actors always have to be up to date to keep their competitive advantage. The authors want to find out what makes some companies in this industry more innovative than others by examining what internal elements that are necessary for innovation. Much research has already been carried out within the field of innovation and especially about innovation management, although less research exists about smaller, non high tech service companies. Therefore the authors also tries to find out how applicable today?s theories are on this special field and thereby fill a smaller gap in today?s research.

This work is a study in how I as a designer can create the conditions for people to work, socializing and refreshments at one place. A place that encourages creativity, where I made a suggestion at a community table designed for Urban Deli?s new business. By visiting various similar sites I have identified what I think is important in an environment like this and then gave an answer to it in a visual form.A cafe-office will draw lots of different people. Which guests come here to work? Residents, freelancers, but also those who may want surrounded by a new creative work place and maybe leave their regular offices for a day at Urban Deli.

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 aim of this Master thesis is to study the public libraries' function as a place for people to meet. Four major questions are taken up: + Do the public libraries have the function of a meeting place? + How important do the librarians and the visitors find the libraries possible function as a meeting place? Do they think that this function is important? + What differs the public libraries from other places in society when it comes to the function of a meeting place? + What differences are there between a larger and a smaller library when it comes to the function of a meeting place ? The basis of this study are interviews with employees at a province library in Jönköping and at a smaller library in Sjöbo in Borås municipality. Our study deals with the history of public libraries, its functions as a meeting place, its architecture, culture, and statistics concerning numbers of visitors and loans of books. The conclusions that are drawn are that the public libraries have qualifications to function as a meeting place even if that isn't always the case.

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.

This case study, ?The sense of place in a courtyard in Gothenburg?, examines whether the city planners? vision correspond to the residents? perception regarding the sense of place and the physical environment in a courtyard in Gothenburg. By carrying out a questionnaire survey, the inhabitants? perception has been explicated, which we have then compared to the total vision for the design of the courtyard that we have gathered from doing interviews with the planning executive, the developer and the landscape architect as well as reviewing the development plan. The study has shown that the vision coincides relatively well with the residents? perception, but it differenciates when it comes to social aspects.

Vårt syfte med denna uppsats är att undersöka och skapa en större förståelse för hur tvärvetenskaplig forskning tillämpas på Ekonomihögskolan i Lund för att skapa innovation. Vårt mål är att tillämpa befintlig teori på insamlad empiri för att tillsammans med vår uppfattning få insikt i hur en kunskapsintensiv organisation i universitetsmiljö följer de teoretiska referenser som finns till en sådan organisation. Genom en deskriptiv ansats undersöker vi empirin genom ett induktivt förfaringssätt. Vi använder en kvalitativ metod som bygger på intervjuer med personer i ledningspositioner på Ekonomihögskolan i Lund. I fallstudien används teorier kopplade till kunskapsintensiva företag och styrning av dessa.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att studera hur små- och medelstora företag (SMF) genom resurser kan etableras och utvecklas inom globala affärsnätverk. Detta för att öka förståelsen teoretisk, samt att förklara den empiriska situation vilken uppsatsen bygger på. Där innovativa svenska SMF under senare år skapat nya möjligheter på en global offshoremarknad genom innovation. En marknad där de är små aktörer gentemot sin omgivning, men ändå tillåts inneha en stark position. Vidare har uppsatsen har en kvalitativ ansats och fallstudie har tillämpats.

Vätternrundan is an annual sporting event that takes place in the Swedish town Motala since 1966. It is one of the world largest recreational bicycle rides and attracts over 20 000 participants each year. This study focuses on event effects and how an event can be of value within the principles of place marketing. Within this study five representatives were interviewed with semi-structured interviews.The results show that the representatives describe Vätternrundan as a positive event which mostly generates positive effects for the city itself and for the people living and working there. The effects consist of the events ability to create awareness of the place, the possibility to extend the tourism season and several social effects like solidarity and interaction.The result also shows that Vätternrundan is a well-known brand and because of this it can be used as an advantage in place marketing.