Application of Open Innovation Paradigm in Small and Medium Enterprises in Russia

The objective of this study is to explore how the Open Innovation paradigm is applied in by small and medium-size enterprises in Russia. The focus of the study is to understand how the processes of research and development and commercialization proceed in these kind of companies and to which extent they apply open innovation principles. Russian leadership makes certain steps for transition from the export of raw materials to an innovative model of economic growth. The research aims to disclose actual impact of these attempts. The closed innovation model and the erosion factors which lead to the destruction of an old one and emergence of new model are described. Features of open innovation implementation and intellectual property rights protection in small and medium enterprises are presented. To achieve the objective, a qualitative case study approach was chosen. Research includes facts and figures, views and opinions of management of studied companies related to innovation process in the company and in Russia in general. The research depicts the features of Open Innovation implementation by SMEs in Russia. A large number of research centers with necessary equipment and qualified personnel allow case companies to use external R&D effectively. They cooperate actively with research institutes, universities and laboratories. Thus, they apply inbound Open Innovation. On the contrary, lack of venture capital, low demand for technologies within the domestic market and weak protection of intellectual property limit the external paths to new markets. Licensing-out and creation of spin-off are isolated cases. Therefore, outbound Open Innovation is not a regular practice.

Aineettomien riskien hallinta – case Itä-Suomen Biopankki

Aineeton pääoma nähdään organisaation keskeisenä kilpailutekijänä ja voimavarana. Se voi kuitenkin joissain tilanteissa olla organisaatiolle myös rasite tai jopa menestymistä heikentävä tekijä. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli laatia biopankin riskienhallinnalle malli, joka huomioi toimintaan vaikuttavat aineettomat riskitekijät ja toimii strategisena johtamisen ja toiminnan kehittämisen työvälineenä. Tutkimus toteutettiin tapaustutkimuksena, jossa käytettiin konstruktiivista tutkimusotetta. Biopankille luotiin konstruktio, riskienhallintamalli, jolla pyrittiin ratkaisemaan reaalimaailman ongelma ja samalla luomaan kontribuutiota tieteenalalle. Biopankki on uudentyyppinen organisaatio, joka kerää, hallinnoi ja säilyttää biologisia ihmisperäisiä näytteitä ja niihin liittyviä tietoja tulevaa tutkimusta varten. Toiminnan riskien taustasyyt ovat usein aineettomia, kuten toimintakulttuuri, asenne, osaaminen tai motivaatio. Tutkimuksessa löydettiin uusia biopankin toimintaan kytkeytyviä aineettomia riskejä koko aineettoman pääoman alueelta ja määriteltiin riskitasoihin perustuva lähestymistapa riskien hallintaan. Konstruktio aineettomien riskien hallintamalliksi sai selkeää vahvistusta tutkimuksen aineistosta, ja se voi toimia organisaation kehittämisen pohjana. Riskikartan luominen ja riskien arviointi ovat tekohetken poikkileikkauksia tilanteesta. Organisaation toiminta ja siihen kohdistuvat riskit ja mahdollisuudet muuttuvat ja kehittyvät. Riskien tunnistaminen lisää tietoa organisaatiosta ja sen toimintaympäristöstä, mikä luo puitteet myös uusien mahdollisuuksien tunnistamiselle. Sopivan riskienhallintamallin avulla voidaan löytää kilpailuetua suhteessa muihin organisaatioihin. Kilpailuetuna voi toimia myös muita parempi riskinkantokyky esimerkiksi toiminnan joustavuuden kautta.

Model for managing non-core ideas to new companies, products and services in a Finnish forest company

Suomalainen metsäteollisuus on muutoksen partaalla. Uutisissa on nähty miten metsäyrityksen sulkevat tehtaita ja paperikoneita. Suomalaisessa metsäteollisuudessa keskitytään tällä hetkellä lähinnä kulujen alentamiseen ja tuottavuuden parantamiseen. Edellytyssille, että suomalainen metsäteollisuus pysyy kilpailukykyisenä, ovat kuitenkinuudet innovaatiot ja toimialojen välinen yhteistyö. Työn tavoitteena oli luoda toimintamalli UPM-Kymmene Oyj:lle, minkä avulla ydinliiketoimintaan kuulumattomat tuote- ja palveluideat saataisiin hyödynnettyä. Aihe on erittäin ajankohtainen, mikäli halutaan pitää tuotanto jatkossakin Suomessa. Luotumalli painottaa pk-sektorin roolia ja potentiaalia kehittää UPM-Kymmeneltä peräisin olevia ja heidän ydinliiketointaan kuulumattomista tuote ja palveluideoistauusia yrityksiä, tuotteita ja palveluita. Malli edustaa uudenlaista ajattelutapaa ja sen käyttöönotto vaatii perinteisen yrityskulttuurin uudistamista UPM-Kymmenessä.

Describing innovative business models and evaluating their wealth potential – Cases Stora Enso and E-bay

Tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli analysoida liiketoimintamalleihin liittyviä teorioita ja erilaisten mallien pohjalta rakentaa selkeä teoria, jota yritykset voivat käyttää määritellessään ja analysoidessaan liiketoimintamalleja. Tutkimuksen kohteena olleet yritykset voitiin jaotella sisäisesti fokusoituneisiin ja ulkoisesti suuntautuneisiin. Jaottelun pohjalta oli mahdollista tehdä johtopäätöksiä koskien liiketoimintamallien potentiaalia. Tutkimus oli luonteeltaan kvalitatiivinen. Tutkimuksen tuloksena on liiketoimintamallien rakentamiseen ja analysointiin sopiva työkalu, jota voidaan käyttää yrityksen strategisessa suunnittelussa.

Knowledge modeling for innovative companies: case of business incubator

The paper presents a study which is aimed at building a knowledge model for a case company – business incubator “Ingria” (St. Petersburg, Russia). The business incubator is one of its kind organization in St. Petersburg, and one of the few in Russia, providing services for innovative entrepreneurial companies at an international level. Business incubation impact is deeply researched from the point of view of knowledge engineering. The paper also provides a broad analysis of various knowledge engineering tools used for visualization of knowledge, as well as knowledge modeling techniques.

The Role of Universities in the Triple Helix model of innovation management within the biotechnology industry, Case example: Turku Science Park Network

Biotechnology has been recognized as the key strategic technology for industrial growth. The industry is heavily dependent on basic research. Finland continues to rank in the top 10 of Europe's most innovative countries in terms of tax-policy, education system, infrastructure and the number of patents issued. Regardless of the excellent statistical results, the output of this innovativeness is below acceptable. Research on the issues hindering the output creation has already been done and the identifiable weaknesses in the Finland's National Innovation system are the non-existent growth of entrepreneurship and the missing internationalization. Finland is proven to have all the enablers of the innovation policy tools, but is lacking the incentives and rewards to push the enablers, such as knowledge and human capital, forward. Science Parks are the biggest operator in research institutes in the Finnish Science and Technology system. They exist with the purpose of speeding up the commercialization process of biotechnology innovations which usually include technological uncertainty, technical inexperience, business inexperience and high technology cost. Innovation management only internally is a rather historic approach, current trend drives towards open innovation model with strong triple helix linkages. The evident problems in the innovation management within the biotechnology industry are examined through a case study approach including analysis of the semi-structured interviews which included biotechnology and business expertise from Turku School of Economics. The results from the interviews supported the theoretical implications as well as conclusions derived from the pilot survey, which focused on the companies inside Turku Science Park network. One major issue that the Finland's National innovation system is struggling with is the fact that it is technology driven, not business pulled. Another problem is the university evaluation scale which focuses more on number of graduates and short-term factors, when it should put more emphasis on the cooperation success in the long-term, such as the triple helix connections with interaction and knowledge distribution. The results of this thesis indicated that there is indeed requirement for some structural changes in the Finland's National innovation system and innovation policy in order to generate successful biotechnology companies and innovation output. There is lack of joint output and scales of success, lack of people with experience, lack of language skills, lack of business knowledge and lack of growth companies.

Application and development of numerical methods for the modelling of innovative gas cooled fission reactors

Innovative gas cooled reactors, such as the pebble bed reactor (PBR) and the gas cooled fast reactor (GFR) offer higher efficiency and new application areas for nuclear energy. Numerical methods were applied and developed to analyse the specific features of these reactor types with fully three dimensional calculation models. In the first part of this thesis, discrete element method (DEM) was used for a physically realistic modelling of the packing of fuel pebbles in PBR geometries and methods were developed for utilising the DEM results in subsequent reactor physics and thermal-hydraulics calculations. In the second part, the flow and heat transfer for a single gas cooled fuel rod of a GFR were investigated with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods. An in-house DEM implementation was validated and used for packing simulations, in which the effect of several parameters on the resulting average packing density was investigated. The restitution coefficient was found out to have the most significant effect. The results can be utilised in further work to obtain a pebble bed with a specific packing density. The packing structures of selected pebble beds were also analysed in detail and local variations in the packing density were observed, which should be taken into account especially in the reactor core thermal-hydraulic analyses. Two open source DEM codes were used to produce stochastic pebble bed configurations to add realism and improve the accuracy of criticality calculations performed with the Monte Carlo reactor physics code Serpent. Russian ASTRA criticality experiments were calculated. Pebble beds corresponding to the experimental specifications within measurement uncertainties were produced in DEM simulations and successfully exported into the subsequent reactor physics analysis. With the developed approach, two typical issues in Monte Carlo reactor physics calculations of pebble bed geometries were avoided. A novel method was developed and implemented as a MATLAB code to calculate porosities in the cells of a CFD calculation mesh constructed over a pebble bed obtained from DEM simulations. The code was further developed to distribute power and temperature data accurately between discrete based reactor physics and continuum based thermal-hydraulics models to enable coupled reactor core calculations. The developed method was also found useful for analysing sphere packings in general. CFD calculations were performed to investigate the pressure losses and heat transfer in three dimensional air cooled smooth and rib roughened rod geometries, housed inside a hexagonal flow channel representing a sub-channel of a single fuel rod of a GFR. The CFD geometry represented the test section of the L-STAR experimental facility at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the calculation results were compared to the corresponding experimental results. Knowledge was gained of the adequacy of various turbulence models and of the modelling requirements and issues related to the specific application. The obtained pressure loss results were in a relatively good agreement with the experimental data. Heat transfer in the smooth rod geometry was somewhat under predicted, which can partly be explained by unaccounted heat losses and uncertainties. In the rib roughened geometry heat transfer was severely under predicted by the used realisable k − epsilon turbulence model. An additional calculation with a v2 − f turbulence model showed significant improvement in the heat transfer results, which is most likely due to the better performance of the model in separated flow problems. Further investigations are suggested before using CFD to make conclusions of the heat transfer performance of rib roughened GFR fuel rod geometries. It is suggested that the viewpoints of numerical modelling are included in the planning of experiments to ease the challenging model construction and simulations and to avoid introducing additional sources of uncertainties. To facilitate the use of advanced calculation approaches, multi-physical aspects in experiments should also be considered and documented in a reasonable detail.