This case study has been conducted within the Swedish fitness chain World Class to explore the opportunities for knowledge development and transfers within franchise networks. We have interviewed the product manager at the World Class headquarter, the owner of a franchise club and a local product manager from the same facility. Our finding indicates that various forms of knowledge transfer occur within the World Class network, particularly in product development and sales. The transfer occurs within the framework set by World Class with regularly scheduled meetings. In addition informal networks provide other means of knowledge exchange between some units.

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.

In the Swedish abattoirs there are assistants that judge the slaughtered animals in regard to diseases and injuries. All diseases and injuries assign different codes. This master?s thesis is about code 42 which means injuries of different kinds like for example bruises etc. These injuries have risen during the transport from the farm to the abattoir lairage or during the stay at the lairage before slaughter.

The Dark Side of the Word-of-Mouse Effect- An experimental study of how negative information in today?s social media can influence consumer perception As a result of the electronic revolution of information dissemination, social media as a phenomenon has come to play an important part, both in society at large but also when it comes to business and marketing. Nowadays, knowledge and opinions about brands and products are spread by reputation through a wide range of social media platforms, a phenomenon which in the literature is referred to as word-of-mouse or electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM).The purpose of this paper is to investigate how people?s opinions towards a company and its product are affected by negative information in terms of eWOM. Or more precisely, whether or not there is a difference in this effect depending on information content, concerning company values on the one hand and product attributes on the other.This was done in an experimental setting where two groups of respondents were subjected to fictitious information of different types using established social media platforms.

The purpose of this master thesis is to present a model that illuminates the important factors when deriving technical information from market data within a company. For companies to be able to become and stay competitive in the market, product quality is an important factor. Whilst good product quality leads to customer satisfaction and loyalty, lack of quality brings costs in service and replacements. To improve product quality, the developers need information and knowledge about what quality issues affect existing products. Most companies gather data from market about known issues, but in order eliminate known quality issues in new products; this data has to be transformed into information and knowledge.

This MA thesis analyzes how the protagonists and the narrative structure relates to ?the Child? as a linguistic/cultural construction in Mare Kandre?s early authorship (1984-1991). A thematic of children portraits defines this period of Kandre?s writing, which consits of the following works: In a Different Country (1984), The Annunciation (1986), Bübin?s Kid (1987), The Burning Tree (1988) and Aliide, Aliide (1991).Linguistic components, such as the word ?child?, the name ?Kid? and a reconstruction of the concept of childhood, holds an actuate position in these narratives when they first appear in direct relation to the protagonists. This suggests how generally accepted categories and concepts consciously are at work in Kandre?s writings.

Travelling children is the topic of my work. Children who commute between more than one home. Society is rapidly changing and so is the concept â familyâ . The nuclear family is no longer the most common one. Children are now travelling more frequently than ever.

?If we consume the product as a product, we consume its meaning through advertising? ? Jean BaudrillardSyftet med denna studie är att identifiera och analysera bakomliggande myter om lycka i kommersiella reklamfilmer, utifrån ett konstruktionistiskt perspektiv. Analysmodellen, som bygger på semiotik och neoformalism, genererade kunskap om de olika berättarstrukturerna kring lycka i de undersökta reklamfilmerna. Resultaten indikerade framförallt att berättarstrukturerna om lycka grundar sig i myter som är starkt kopplade till den kapitalistiska ideologin. Studien avser därmed att blottlägga och analysera myter om lycka i reklamfilmer ur ett kritiskt konstruktionistiskt perspektiv..

In recent years the development of mobile devices has made great progress and today they account for a large proportion of the internet usage. This trend poses new demands on web developers as more companies and product owners want to customize their services and products for this new market. In this study we examine the pros and cons of the strategies desktop-first and mobile-first in the development of adaptive interfaces for the web. The study aims to create guidelines for situations in which each strategy fits well. The purpose of the study is to create an understanding of how these strategies can help developers and product owners to develop adaptive interfaces based on different goals and objectives.

This report describes the bachelor degree project called ?A case study in strategic product design in collaboration with Elfa? carried out by Mathieu Gustafsson and Pär Rickberg,students at Carl Malmsten Furniture Studies.We had the opportunity to do our degree project in collaboration with ELFA after a previous school project where we made suggestions for new products. Initially the brief was to develop new products for the company which was based on previous proposals.Reasoning led us in to design strategies and how to use such a strategy to develop newproducts for ELFA. During our first superficial analysis of ELFA and its current products, we found that we wanted to recast the framework of identity and context in which the product would be created. According to the researches made by SVID (The Swedish Industrial Design Foundation),companies that continually are working with design strategies strengthens the brand, its competitiveness and become more innovative.

This report is a bachelor thesis work in the field of product development and design. The assignment has been to develop a solution for roof racks, normally used for cars, to fit on the open trailer models FS1425 and Alugance. The project was implemented by Johan Andersson and Victor Karlsson, students at the Mechanical Engineering program with a focus on product development and design at Jo?nko?ping?s school of Engineering, in spring 2012.The client wants to use transport solutions in the same way as roof racks on cars. The user of such a product is assumed to desire simplicity, safety and an attractive design with an appealing price, which has been a challenge during the thesis work.Pre-studies have been conducted to examine the potential competitors and gain knowledge in the research area.

This Master thesis has been carried out at Scania CV AB in Södertälje, in collaboration withKTH, The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. The focus of this Master thesis isSetBased Concurrent Engineering(SBCE), with the purpose of answering the questions: what isSBCE, how does it work, and for what purposes is it applied.It was early established thatSBCE is often included as a part of Lean product development,which in its turn is often related to Toyota?s way of working. TheSBCE method includesworking with multiple solutions in parallel, eliminating weak alternatives throughout thewhole process. In opposite to a conventional product development process, where it iscommon one at an early stage tries to identify and choose the most promising alternative.Despite the appearance ofSBCE as a resource consuming method, figures from Toyotaindicates the opposite, thatSBCE is in fact a very effective way of working compared to othermore traditional methods.The process of this Master thesis was divided into three phases.

This essay is called ?The hunt for anarchists- a study about the police in Stockholm's collection of bandit portrait during the turn of the century 1900? and it is about the criminal category ?Anarchists? who the police in Stockholm used at the turn of the century 1900.  In the archive from the police in Stockholm during the essays time perspective, 1899-1909,  there are about one hundred photographs in the category ?Anarchists?, about half of these pictures have no information besides the names of the people, but the other half, 48 persons, have some information about age, work title and where the person come from. The information showed that the people in the pictures where not from Sweden, and after controlling them in all different kinds of archives I found only ten of them have left any traces in Stockholm. What I realized then was that the people on the pictures are anarchists from different countries in Europe, mostly from Italy, and that the police in Stockholm had these pictures because different police stations around Europe had sent them to the police in Stockholm. The police in Stockholm where on the lookout for fugitive anarchists.The literature about the anarchist movement in Italy during this time describe the hard situation for Italian anarchists.

This report is the result of a master thesis carried out by the author, student at the Royal Instituteof Technology(KTH). The task was performed as a product development process at a companycalled Ameibo AB, located in Stockholm. It is the final task of the studies at the Master'sprogramme Design and Product Realization. The report is structured in a chronological order anddescribes the methods used, the implementation of these methods and a presentation of theresults given from these studies.Ameibo is a company located in Stockholm, distributing films on the internet. The aim of thismaster thesis was to investigate the possibilities of entering the market for portable devices.

The product structure of the fuel tank installation is one of the most complex product areas at Scania. Caused by the number of parameters, which affect the fuel tank installation, a product structure is created which is very difficult to handle. Knowledge exist that the structure in a nearby future will be considerable more complex. The purpose of the study has been to understand in why this complexity exist and find ways to break the trend of a growing product structure. The goal was to achieve a more standardized fuel tank installation.A theoretical study was performed in order to bring knowledge in relevant areas both in general theory but also in documentation at Scania.