Fundraising and investor relations in social enterprise: Marketing your way out of the pioneer gap in African off-grid renewable energy

Social enterprises apply the best of business for the pursuit of social or environmental mission while also generating revenues. Globally, nearly 1,3 billion people lack access to electricity, as well as another billion having access to only low quality and infrequent electricity. Off-grid renewable energy, like solar, will increasingly have a key role in the solution of the energy access issue. The pioneer gap in off-grid renewable energy consists of financing (or funding) gaps and capacity gaps, to do with both the early stage of the enterprises in question, as well as the early stage of the whole industry. The gaps are emphasised by specific characteristics of off-grid renewable energy business models and the requirements of operating in bottom-of-the-pyramid markets. The marketing perspective to fundraising is chosen to uncover the possible role enterprises themselves have in bridging the pioneer gap. The purpose of this thesis is to study how social enterprises operating in off-grid renewable energy in Africa utilise marketing activities in their investor relations in bridging the pioneer gap. This main research question is divided into the following sub-questions:  How does the pioneer gap affect fundraising for these enterprises?  How are the funding needs for these enterprises characterised?  How do these enterprises build trust in their investor relations? The theoretic framework is built on relationship marketing and investor relations, with an emphasis on creation of trust. The research is conducted as a thematical case study. Primary data is gathered via semi-structured interviews with six solar energy companies and two accelerators. According to the findings, the main components affecting trust-creation are diminished information asymmetry and perceived risk, mission alignment as well as a personal fit or relationship with the investor. Therefore, an enterprise can utilise e.g. the following marketing activities in their investor relations to bridge the pioneer gap: ensuring investor material, the enterprise story and presenting of them is clear, concise and complete to “package” the enterprise as an investment; taking investor needs and motivations into account as well as utilising existing investors as ambassadors.

Production unit’s overhead cost allocation with activity-based costing in food industry enterprise

The main objective of this Master’s thesis is to develop a cost allocation model for a leading food industry company in Finland. The goal is to develop an allocation method for fixed overhead expenses produced in a specific production unit and create a plausible tracking system for product costs. The second objective is to construct an allocation model and modify the created model to be suited for other units as well. Costs, activities, drivers and appropriate allocation methods are studied. This thesis is started with literature review of existing theory of ABC, inspecting cost information and then conducting interviews with officials to get a general view of the requirements for the model to be constructed. The familiarization of the company started with becoming acquainted with the existing cost accounting methods. The main proposals for a new allocation model were revealed through interviews, which were utilized in setting targets for developing the new allocation method. As a result of this thesis, an Excel-based model is created based on the theoretical and empiric data. The new system is able to handle overhead costs in more detail improving the cost awareness, transparency in cost allocations and enhancing products’ cost structure. The improved cost awareness is received by selecting the best possible cost drivers for this situation. Also the capacity changes are taken into consideration, such as usage of practical or normal capacity instead of theoretical is suggested to apply. Also some recommendations for further development are made about capacity handling and cost collection.

Current State of Ontology Matching. A Survey of Ontology and Schema Matching

Ontology matching is an important task when data from multiple data sources is integrated. Problems of ontology matching have been studied widely in the researchliterature and many different solutions and approaches have been proposed alsoin commercial software tools. In this survey, well-known approaches of ontologymatching, and its subtype schema matching, are reviewed and compared. The aimof this report is to summarize the knowledge about the state-of-the-art solutionsfrom the research literature, discuss how the methods work on different application domains, and analyze pros and cons of different open source and academic tools inthe commercial world.

Role of service and data reuse in enterprises

Digitalization has been predicted to change the future as a growing range of non-routine tasks will be automated, offering new kinds of business models for enterprises. Serviceoriented architecture (SOA) provides a basis for designing and implementing welldefined problems as reusable services, allowing computers to execute them. Serviceoriented design has potential to act as a mediator between IT and human resources, but enterprises struggle with their SOA adoption and lack a linkage between the benefits and costs of services. This thesis studies the phenomenon of service reuse in enterprises, proposing an ontology to link different kinds of services with their role conceptually as a part of the business model. The proposed ontology has been created on the basis of qualitative research conducted in three large enterprises. Service reuse has two roles in enterprises: it enables automated data sharing among human and IT resources, and it may provide cost savings in service development and operations. From a technical viewpoint, the ability to define a business problem as a service is one of the key enablers for achieving service reuse. The research proposes two service identification methods, first to identify prospective services in the existing documentation of the enterprise and secondly to model the services from a functional viewpoint, supporting service identification sessions with business stakeholders.

Social-business tensions and their management in social enterprise: evidence from Finland.

This thesis aims to provide insight into the social-business tensions the social enterprises face in their operation and how they manage them. The social-business tensions are examined from four theoretical perspectives using triangulation approach. The theoretical lenses chosen are organizational identity, stakeholder theory, paradox theory and institutional theory. The theories aim to clarify, how the tensions are formed, how they appear and how they are managed in social enterprises. One viewpoint of this thesis is to examine the competence of these theories in explaining the social-business tensions in practise. The qualitative data was collected by interviewing persons from the management of two social enterprises. The empirical evidence of this thesis suggests that the appearing of social-business tensions varies between the social enterprises and they can be seen both as an advantage and as a challenge. Most of the social-business tensions arise from the enterprise’s multiple incoherent objectives, their stakeholders’ various demands and the differing understanding of the company’s central operation among the members of the organization. According to this thesis, the theories of organizational identity, stakeholder, paradox and institution are all able to provide unique insight into the identification and management of the social-business tensions. However, the paradox theory turned out to be the most abstract of the theories and thus being the farthest from the practise.

Acquisition Failure: The case of a multinational enterprise from an emerging market failing in Indonesia.

The escalation in the number of mergers and acquisition transactions involving emerging market firms is a relatively recent phenomenon; as a consequence academic research in such topic is rather limited. The purpose of this research study was to discuss the possible reasons that led the acquisition failure of an emerging multinational firm and an Indonesian player. Extensive theoretical research was performed and it had been achieved, based on this, the finding of a framework that facilitated to understand the way in which the concepts of cultural distances and relate liabilities of foreignness in the process of acquisitions of foreign companies in emerging markets. The theoretical background collects literature related to acquisitions, models of cultural studies between nations and liabilities of foreignness. It has been generated a variety of frameworks that aid to understand the way that the institutional distance and cultural factors together with the concept of liabilities of foreignness can affect the process of market entry of an emerging multinational company to the extent that the best way to stop losing money is to abandon the project. The empirical research consisted of selective semi-structured interviews and an extensive research in available public data on the chosen study case of this research. There were several factors that were identified as the cause of the failure in the market entry of a Mexican multinational firm in Indonesia. The weakness shown by the local government authorities was used by the local community leaders who rioted because of discomfort. These groups were the ones who made the government submit to the extent that the agreements reached at the beginning of the deal were either canceled or modified in a way that favored always the local community. The contributions of this study fall into the knowledge field of emerging multinational firms and market entry process.

Benefits and challenges of Enterprise Resource Planning for Pakistani SMEs

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is used to combine all the functions happening inside the organization with the help of one software. All the data is centralized which makes it easy to manage information for all participants. The literature on ERP is studied thoroughly the whole process of adoption till the implementation and final evaluations. But studies that focus on small and medium sized enterprises are limited in number when compared to the large scale enterprises. In case of Pakistan, research is very limited. In this thesis, the author tries to analyze the current status of SMEs usage of ERP system. The benefits obtained and challenges faced by SMEs of Pakistan are studied. Framework presented by Shang and Seddon (2000) is used to understand the benefits obtained by the SMEs in Pakistan. This is a comprehensive framework that classifies the benefits obtained by the ERP adoption, into five categories: operational benefits, managerial benefits, Strategic benefits, IT benefits, and Organizational benefits. The results show that SMEs of Pakistan are also getting many benefits after adoption of ERP. Most of the firms had implemented SAP software. Operational benefits were mentioned by all the firms. The most important benefits were report generation, quick access to critical information, better product and cost planning. Respondents also mentioned that they had reduced corruption as a result of ERP implementation. It is also an important benefit considering high corruption rate in Pakistan. Along with benefits, challenges faced by Pakistani SMEs included infrastructure problems like electricity, difficulties with integration of one module with other module, costs of adoption and lack of skilled ERP consultants. Further studies in this regard can be conducted on cloud based ERP which is fast growing all around the world.