During spring 2009 a three meter tall and laughing robot was developed in collaboration between Royal Institute of Technology and Royal University College of Fine Arts. The robots function and esthetics is based on an existing toy robot called Elmo. Elmo is 30 cm tall but now the goal was to make it 1000 times bigger in order to present it on the spring exhibition of Royal University College of Fine Arts. Due to only four months of developing and building time a demand of fast determination and good planning was required. In order to make a good structure for the project it is divided into five phases: Analysis of Elmo, planning, concept development, detail construction and finally product development and testing.In the first phase valuable knowledge is obtained according to the movements and geometry of Elmo.

Problem discussion: That empowerment and autonomy can lead to desirable effects on employees is clear. Previous research has found correlations between empowerment and e.g. motivation, job satisfaction, productivity, loyalty and commitment. However, a control problem arises when employees have more freedom in decision-making which could potentially lead to undesirable outcomes. It thus becomes a type of dilemma for management and managers where you have to try to balance a restrictive use of the control system (to maintain control) and an enabling use (to promote empowerment).Purpose: The purpose of this study is therefore to identify how a company can use its control system in order to achieve empowerment while maintaining acceptable levels of control.

Bakgrund: Människors förändrade levnadsvanor med upplevelser så som hotell- och restaurangbesök har ökat kravet på den service som förväntas inom branschen. Kravet på ökad service ställer krav på att medarbetare ska vara motiverade till att prestera för att kunna erbjuda den service som efterfrågas och för att företagen ska kunna nå upp till sina uppsatta mål. För att motivera sina medarbetare och få dem att ta beslut som är i enighet med företagets mål kan företag använda sig av ett belöningssystem.Syfte: Syftet med studien är att kartlägga hur belöningssystemet i hotellkedjan är utformat för hotelldirektörerna samt hur bonussystemet uppfattas påverka motivation, handlande och beslutsfattande. Ett andra syfte är att identifiera och analysera de positiva och negativa effekter bonussystemet kan ge upphov till.Metod: En kvalitativ studie har tillämpats och en fallstudie på ett företag inom hotellbranschen har genomförts. Semi-strukturerade intervjuer med fem hotelldirektörer inom hotellkedjan har legat till grund för det empiriska materialet.Resultat och slutsatser: Studien visar att bonussystemet får hotelldirektörerna att bli motiverade till att prestera.

During the year 2014, Artex AB has worked to launch a new product whose function is to locally purify the air. The product is a headboard and its purpose is to give the user clean air while sleeping. The air purifier has different speeds and it`s up to the user to choose which effect that will be on. To get the best experience of the product as possible, the air purifier shall be controlled by a mobile application. In that way the user can increase and decrease the fan speed, even when the user not is home.

I dagens allt mer globaliserade företagsklimat är det viktigt att på ett optimalt sätt hantera informations- och kunskapsrelaterade frågor. I takt med den ständiga förändringen som pågår så har begreppet Knowledge Management (KM) blivit ett populärt ämnesområde. KM kan enligt oss vara hur en organisation arbetar och hanterar kunskap för att kunna öka sin konkurrenskraft.Vårt syfte med denna kandidatuppsats har varit att undersöka hur den mestadels engelsk-språkiga litteraturen inom ämnesområdet KM går att applicera på svenska organisationer. Detta med avsikt på att kunna mäta en organisations KM-tillstånd. Vårt forskningsarbete har även målsättningen att generera förändrings- och förbättringsförslag åt en global orga-nisation som vårt referensföretag.För att uppfylla syftet har vi valt att utföra en surveyundersökning som bygger på Bukowitz och Williams bok, The Knowledge Management Fieldbook (1999).

With the help of large amount of archive material I have examined how Gustavsberg in Värmdö were affected by the great labor migration in Gustavsberg porcelain factory during the period 1869-1924. I have chosen to investigate how the municipality dealt with the poverty relief issue out of the labour immigration perspective. To my surprise I found out that Värmdö was not responsible for Gustavsberg in the poverty issue. The workers belonged to the factory, which had a relatively well-developed system of poverty relief in place. This is not to say that the workers received any support from the factory to any great extent.

Globally, coastal ecosystems like mangrove forests, sea grass meadows and salt marshes are well known for their ability to capture and store atmospheric carbon effectively. In Sweden, there is still limited knowledge about local coastal ecosystems with similar functions, with alder swamp forests being an interesting example. Therefore, this study aimed to increase knowledge of the factors that can contribute to the potential carbon sequestering ability of alder swamps. Vegetation data and sediment samples were collected from a total of 37 sampling plots across four alder swamps in Bohusl?n on the Swedish west coast.

Mikroföretag skiljer sig från små och stora företag. Ägaren är en central del i mikroföretag och oftast även den enda beslutsfattaren. Detta innebär att ägaren som person inverkar på de beslut som tas i företaget. I beteendeteori diskuteras objektivitet och rationalitet vid beslutsfattande. Där betonas det att individer har mycket svårt att bortse helt ifrån sig själva.

In many products a compromise between ground clearance and the required space to store the product has to be made. This problem attracted the attention of the authors of this thesis.The objective of this project is to develop a functioning solution to a foldable wheel. The solution should be applicable to several types of product groups. A limitation for this work has been made so that the work only covers solutions for lighter vehicles.The purpose is to drive this project forward, so that a solution can be found. Furthermore the purpose of the report is to clarify how the authors proceeded to design and construct the wheel according to a fixed specification.

Previous research has shown that internal communication can be linked with how motivated a project team is, but research that shows examples of how this works is missing. This paper therefore aims to study how two different IT projects are working with internal communication. By analyzing its strengths and weaknesses, we wanted to study how these could be linked to the project team's motivation. In doing so, we wanted to be able to give examples of how projects could work with internal communication to motivate their project teams. Essay questions of the study are:? How does the internal communication occur in the projects?? Which strengths and weaknesses are to be found in the internal communication?? How does the internal communication influence the project members' motivation? To fulfill the purpose of the study it was needed informants interviews with the project manager for each project to access the facts, and respondent interviews with the project members from each project for accessing opinions.The results from the interviews show that both projects have effective communication, even if it looked different, and doesn't quite agree with what previous research recommends.

AbstractSkanska Sweden has decided to split the organization that earlier handled both large and small projects into two different subsidiaries. A consequence of this is that all construction service handling will from now on be enforced under the name Skanska Direkt AB. The management of Skanska sees this as an opportunity to develop the organization and in the long term achieve higher earnings.   The task which Skanska in connection with the reorganization wanted to be investigated was a proposal on how the organization of work with the insurance work in the future should look like.The organization that is handled is from production manager to professional workers and includes damage handling that has been obtained from insurance companies in the southern and northern parts of Värmland. The purpose with this work is to present a different kind of view to the problem with developing this branch of the company. The main target was to work out a proposal of an organizational plan for the damage handling in Skanska Direkt AB that is possible to apply, less sensitive for dismissals, results in higher earnings, obtains higher customer satisfaction and also a staff stab that develops their skills at their own.The report and work progressed as following:Opening theory study of strategies to obtain the objectives set.Restructuring of existing organization with theories as support.Interviews with the actors involved to verify feasibility of the developed organization plan  Organization chart, the result of work means that some workers at each location shall be responsible for a small group of workers and work independently. They shall manage the process of invoicing and calculate costs at the same time as they work out on the workplace.

Varumärken är viktiga för företags vara eller icke vara. Ett företag vars varumärke är dåligt eller döende kan gå samma öde till mötes som varumärket. Därför är det förvånande att, enligt en undersökning gjord av en varumärkesbyrå publicerad i en branschtidning, marknads- och informationschefer i Stockholm har dålig koll på sitt varumärke. I vår studie undersöks vilka problem som kundföretag oftast har när de söker hjälp av en varumärkesbyrå. Vi försöker sedan att identifiera varför, och möjliga lösningar för att lösa eller förminska dessa problem.

Som en effekt av den ökade konkurrensen och de möjligheter som globaliseringen och utvecklingen av IT medger har det blivit allt vanligare att industriföretag outsourcar delar av sin verksamhet. När en funktion flyttas ut från företaget är väl fungerande kommunikation mellan funktionen och övrig verksamhet väsentligt för ett lyckat samarbete.Denna kandidatuppsats kommer att söka svar på hur företag som använder sig av outsourcing kommunicerar med sina underleverantörer som är placerade i andra länder, samt vilka kommunikationsproblem som kan uppstå. Studien avgränsar sig till väletablerade och stora företag vilka har sin kärnverksamhet i Stockholm.För att besvara frågeställningen genomförs semistrukturella kvalitativa intervjuer på åtta företag. Frågorna i intervjuerna ställs med utgångspunkt från frågeställningen samt utifrån studiens teoretiska referensram. Denna rapport är en delstudie som främst fokuserar på två av de åtta företagen.Det första företaget som presenteras i uppsatsen är Ericsson.

An important task for project managers in multi-project environments is to effectively choose the right people to the project team. For organizations, it means being able to prioritize and plan human resources among the various projects running in parallel. The purpose of this paper is to describe how a project manager in multi-project environments looks at the allocation of people in their projects. We did our research through literature reviews and interviews with seven project managers.The research shows that the studied organizations highlight both the expertise and the personal factors in an election. They do not use any specific personality test to identify their staff.

The last few years have been characterised by increasing online communication and the emergence of social media, made possible by Web 2.0. In society as well as in research, social media is used for knowledge produc- tion and networking. One example of this is Mendeley, a social reference management tool. With answers from users all over the world, this study investigates the use of Mendeley, if the respondents use other social media and if all of this affects scientific communication. The aim is also to study what the respondents think about the future of scientific communication and if this can be related to current tendencies.The theoretic framework for this study is based on Leah Lievrouws research on the Cycle of Scientific Communication and the relationship between the ?Little Science 2.0?-scenario and the ?Big Science Retrench- ment?-scenario.A qualitative web based survey was conducted (41 answers) and complemented with an interview with a professor in environmental sciences.