Web 2.0 technology assisted global knowledge network as an organizations key asset

Aim of the Thesis is to study and understand the theoretical concept of Metanational corporation and understand how the Web 2.0 technologies can be used to support the theory. Empiric part of the study compares the theory to the case company’s current situation Goal of theoretical framework is to show how the Web 2.0 technologies can be used in the three levels of the Metanational corporation. In order to do this, knowledge management and more accurately knowledge transferring is studied to understand what is needed from the Web 2.0 technologies in the different functions and operations of the Metanational corporation. Final synthesis of the theoretical framework is to present a model where the Web 2.0 technologies are placed on the levels of the Metanational corporation. Empirical part of the study is based on interviews made in the case company. Aim of the interviews is to understand the current state of the company related to the theoretical framework. Based on the interviews, the differences between the theoretical concept and the case company are presented and studied. Finally the study presents the found problem areas, and where the adoption of the Web 2.0 tools is seen as beneficiary, based on the interviews and theoretical framework.

Measuring Brand Equity and Analyzing Its Relationship with Key Marketing Mix Elements

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of price and advertising on brand equity. The dimensionality of brand equity is thoroughly examined, and the effect price, price deals, perceived advertising spending and advertising appeal have on the dimensions of brand equity are analyzed using multiple regression analysis as well as other supporting analyses. Price and advertising are found to be of great importance to brand equity. Arguably the most influential finding is the strong positive effect low prices – an integral brand element – have on the case company brand equity, even though a negative effect was hypothesized based on prior research. The results also support separating advertising appeal from perceived advertising spending, as well as linking service quality as part of the overall perceived quality in the context of service-intensive firms.

Customer knowledge processing in key account management

The ability of the supplier firm to generate and utilise customer-specific knowledge has attracted increasing attention in the academic literature during the last decade. It has been argued the customer knowledge should treated as a strategic asset the same as any other intangible assets. Yet, at the same time it has been shown that the management of customer-specific knowledge is challenging in practice, and that many firms are better at acquiring customer knowledge than at making use of it. This study examines customer knowledge processing in the context of key account management in large industrial firms. This focus was chosen because key accounts are demanding and complex. It is not unusual for a single key account relationship to constitute a complex web of relationships between the supplier and the key account – thus easily leading to the dispersion of customer-specific knowledge in the supplier firm. Although the importance of customer-specific knowledge generation has been widely acknowledged in the literature, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the processes through which firms generate, disseminate and use such knowledge internally for enhancing the relationships with their major, strategically important key account customers. This thesis consists of two parts. The first part comprises a theoretical overview and draws together the main findings of the study, whereas the second part consists of five complementary empirical research papers based on survey data gathered from large industrial firms in Finland. The findings suggest that the management of customer knowledge generated about and form key accounts is a three-dimensional process consisting of acquisition, dissemination and utilization. It could be concluded from the results that customer-specific knowledge is a strategic asset because the supplier’s customer knowledge processing activities have a positive effect on supplier’s key account performance. Moreover, in examining the determinants of each phase separately the study identifies a number of intra-organisational factors that facilitate the process in supplier firms. The main contribution of the thesis lies in linking the concept of customer knowledge processing to the previous literature on key account management. Moreover, given than this literature is mainly conceptual or case-based, a further contribution is to examine its consequences and determinants based on quantitative empirical data.

Key performance indicators for supplier and assortement evaluation

Tutkimuksen tavoite oli selvittää suorituskyvyn mittaamista, mittareita ja niiden suunnittelua tukku- ja jakeluliiketoiminnassa. Kriittisten menestystekijöiden mittarit auttavat yritystä kohti yhteistä päämäärää. Kriittisten menestystekijöiden mittarit ovat usein yhdistetty strategiseen suunnitteluun ja implementointiin ja niillä on yhtäläisyyksiä monien strategisten työkalujen kun Balanced scorecardin kanssa. Tutkimus ongelma voidaan esittää kysymyksen muodossa. •Mitkä ovat Oriola KD:n pitkänaikavälin tavoitteita tukevat kriittisten menestystekijöiden mittarit (KPIs) toimittajan ja tuotevalikoiman mittaamisessa? Tutkimus on jaettu kirjalliseen ja empiiriseen osaan. Kirjallisuus katsaus käsittelee aikaisempaa tutkimusta strategian, toimitusketjun hallinnan, toimittajan arvioinnin ja erilaisten suorituskyvyn mittaamisjärjestelmien osalta. Empiirinen osuus etenee nykytila-analyysista ehdotettuihin kriittisten menestystekijöiden mittareihin, jotka ovat kehitetty kirjallisuudesta löydetyn mallin avulla. Tutkimuksen lopputuloksena ovat case yrityksen tarpeisiin kehitetyt kriittisten menestystekijöiden mittarit toimittajan ja tuotevalikoiman arvioinnissa.

Key performance indicators for successful metadata governance

Metadata in increasing levels of sophistication has been the most powerful concept used in management of unstructured information ever since the first librarian used the Dewey decimal system for library classifications. It remains to be seen, however, what the best approach is to implementing metadata to manage huge volumes of unstructured information in a large organization. Also, once implemented, how is it possible to track whether it is adding value to the company, and whether the implementation has been successful? Existing literature on metadata seems to either focus too much on technical and quality aspects or describe issues with respect to adoption for general information management initiatives. This research therefore, strives to contribute to these gaps: to give a consolidated framework for striving to understand the value added by implementing metadata. The basic methodology used is that of case study, which incorporates aspects of design science, surveys, and interviews in order to provide a holistic approach to quantitative and qualitative analysis of the case. The research identifies the various approaches to implementing metadata, particularly studying the one followed by the unit of analysis of case study, a large company in the Oil and Gas Sector. Of the three approaches identified, the selected company already follows an approach that appears to be superior. The researcher further explores its shortcomings, and proposes a slightly modified approach that can handle them. The research categorically and thoroughly (in context) identifies the top effectiveness criteria, and corresponding key performance indicators(KPIs) that can be measured to understand the level of advancement of the metadata management initiative in the company. In an effort to contrast and have a basis of comparison for the findings, the research also includes views from information managers dealing with core structured data stored in ERPs and other databases. In addition, the results include the basic criteria that can be used to evaluate metrics, in order to classify a metric as a KPI.

Key success factors and process for IT project portfolio management

The importance of Information Technology (IT) in the business environment is continuously growing. This stimulates the increase of size, complexity and number of IT projects and raises the need for IT Project Portfolio Management (IT PPM). While being actively discussed for the last few decades, IT PPM has a short history of practical implementation. This creates inconsistency in the views of different authors and provides an opportunity for additional research. As a first step, this research explores the existing studies and brings together the views of different authors on IT PPM. As a result, a high-level IT PPM Process Cycle and a set of Key Success Factors for IT PPM are proposed. IT PPM Process Cycle gives an overview of the main elements of IT PPM process, while the set of Key Success Factors provides a number of factors that should be considered during the implementation. As a second step, both theoretical deliverables are empirically tested by a case study and a survey conducted in a big multinational company. The case study is used to analyze process framework of the studied company towards the developed IT PPM Process Cycle. Subsequently, a survey was conducted among subject matter experts of the same company to evaluate the importance and relevance of the proposed Key Success Factors. Finally, this thesis concludes with findings made during the case study and provides an empirically tested selection of factors to be taken into account. These two deliverables can be used by both academics and practitioners to close the gaps in existing literature and assist in IT PPM implementation.

Combination of catalyst development and chemical reaction engineering : a key aspect to improve the hydrogen peroxide direct synthesis

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The key practices of customer portfolio management (CPM) process in the medical and healthcare B2B industry

The goal of this study is to deepen the understanding of the customer portfolio management process. There are many models for the process, and they are not necessarily exclusive of each other. Consequently, the inclusion of many models might even prove out to be beneficial. Other theoretical framework include the current economical situation and its propose on customer portfolio management. With an understanding of the theoretical models as a background, the empirical part of this study compares Finnish multinational medical and healthcare technology companies’ customer portfolio management practices. The empirical research was carried out with theme interviews held with 11 sales and marketing managers or directors from four different companies. The goal was to discover the most essential practices of the process steps in the companies. The result of this study is that there is a lack of systematic customer portfolio management, but most companies are aiming to improve this in the near future. The most essential practices are analysis of sales, communication level, learning, and commitment to strategy of the focal company. Special characteristics of this industry include large business networks that include customers, professional end-users, institutions, universities, researchers, and key opinion leaders. The management and analysis of this comprehensive network has been seen to be extremely important for this industry.

Key factors in transforming university internationalization into commercial activity in Finland. Case of University of Turku

Globalization, developments in ICT, emergence of knowledge society and other changes have reformed the environment for international higher education during the past few decades. Consequently, higher education sector has moved towards more marketing-oriented system, and universities have started to undertake commercial activities as part of their internationalization. This development has emerged to Finland as well, which forms the basis for this study. The purpose is to examine commercialization in Finnish university landscape and to investigate the ways Finnish university could capitalize its international activities and educational knowledge for export. The research question of the study is: What are the key factors in transforming university internationalization into commercial activity in the Finnish university landscape? The main problem is further divided into three sub-questions: 1) How can a university internationalize; 2) what are the motivational factors behind university internationalization and commercialization; and 3) how can higher education be developed into export services and products? The research was conducted as a qualitative case study of University of Turku. Methods used for gathering and examining data were interviewing and document analysis. Primary data was collected through four individual semi-structured interviews, which were conducted face-to-face. Secondary data that included reports, articles and electronic materials such as university web pages, was used to complement the primary data. The results were analyzed by theming the data into three broader categories of internationalization activities; drivers and motivations and; education export activities. After the data was organized in themes, analysis continued by comparing different parts of data and finding patterns that would explain the phenomenon in Finnish universities. According to the empirical data, University of Turku is currently on the growth state of internationalization with strategies such as internationalization of curriculum, establishment of international research groups, mobility of students and academics, international networking and support services. Commercialization phenomenon is still rather new to the case university, but it has already developed educational products and services for export. The study concludes that university internationalization cannot be directly transformed into commercial activities in the Finnish context, but the universities need to be active in actually creating educational products. The key factors found in this study include: 1) the Finnish government policies behind the current hype of export education; 2) the potential and knowledge capacity of universities for exports; 3) need for additional profits; 4) further internationalization through commercial activities; 5) recognizing and exploiting the specific areas of strength and 6) establishing of cooperative partnerships for better products.

Mythology as a key to historical ways of thinking

Kirjallisuusarvostelu

Making the impact on research and society : a case study: crowdsourcing solutions developed for the linguistic research and citizen science

Can crowdsourcing solutions serve many masters? Can they be beneficial for both, for the layman or native speakers of minority languages on the one hand and serious linguistic research on the other? How did an infrastructure that was designed to support linguistics turn out to be a solution for raising awareness of native languages? Since 2012 the National Library of Finland has been developing the Digitisation Project for Kindred Languages, in which the key objective is to support a culture of openness and interaction in linguistic research, but also to promote crowdsourcing as a tool for participation of the language community in research. In the course of the project, over 1,200 monographs and nearly 111,000 pages of newspapers in Finno-Ugric languages will be digitised and made available in the Fenno-Ugrica digital collection. This material was published in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, and users have had only sporadic access to the material. The publication of open-access and searchable materials from this period is a goldmine for researchers. Historians, social scientists and laymen with an interest in specific local publications can now find text materials pertinent to their studies. The linguistically-oriented population can also find writings to delight them: (1) lexical items specific to a given publication, and (2) orthographically-documented specifics of phonetics. In addition to the open access collection, we developed an open source code OCR editor that enables the editing of machine-encoded text for the benefit of linguistic research. This tool was necessary since these rare and peripheral prints often include already archaic characters, which are neglected by modern OCR software developers but belong to the historical context of kindred languages, and are thus an essential part of the linguistic heritage. When modelling the OCR editor, it was essential to consider both the needs of researchers and the capabilities of lay citizens, and to have them participate in the planning and execution of the project from the very beginning. By implementing the feedback iteratively from both groups, it was possible to transform the requested changes as tools for research that not only supported the work of linguistics but also encouraged the citizen scientists to face the challenge and work with the crowdsourcing tools for the benefit of research. This presentation will not only deal with the technical aspects, developments and achievements of the infrastructure but will highlight the way in which user groups, researchers and lay citizens were engaged in a process as an active and communicative group of users and how their contributions were made to mutual benefit.

Interoperability specifications and an automatic validation tool as a key factor for the support of a repository ecosystem

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014