Can tourism be sustainable? : service experiences from tourism destinations in Europe

The tourism industry is growing rapidly, and thus there is an urgent need to developing sustainable tourism. The research objective of the thesis is to explore and discuss the concept of sustainability within the tourism industry from a marketing point of view, focusing on the perspective of tourist producers’. The thesis consists of four studies, each of which contains different perspectives to support this overall objective. The first study deals with how a hotel can achieve economic sustainability by creating a high level of customer service delivery using a refined GAP-model. The second study examines how tourist producers at mass tourism destinations work with sustainable tourism as a strategic marketing tool in their tourism product development. The third study addresses economic sustainability at the macro level by estimating the tourism demand for Sweden and Norway in five different countries. In the fourth study, the concept of sustainable mass tourism is developed and analyzed from a conceptual standpoint. Study 1 and study 3 concentrate on economic sustainability from a micro and national perspective. The main contribution of Study 1 is the refined GAP-model, which can be seen as a theoretical contribution to the service marketing research. Study 3 shows that exchange rate trends strongly affect tourists’ choice of destination. Study 2 examines sustainable mass tourism as a strategic marketing tool at the destination level. The conclusions of Study 2 contribute to the findings of Study 4 and consider the tourist producers approach to sustainable tourism. One of the contributions of Study 4 is that the concept of sustainable tourism should be divided into three separate parts; economic sustainability, social sustainability and environmental sustainability.

Finnish SMEs and Russian Business Environment: Challenges and Support Activities

The purpose of this study is based on the need of finding what kind of problems Finnish SMEs face in Russian market and how they could be supported. Used support activities in certain levels of internationalization and internationalization patterns are evaluated, international experience of entrepreneur is compared to used support activities and the most challenging pillars in Russia from the Institutional Theory are defined. The empirical part of the study is a semi structured qualitative analysis of ten case companies that represent different industry fields. All of them are SMEs and they represent different levels of internationalization and internationalization patterns. The results of this study indicated that usefulness of support activities have to be evaluated case by case. All the companies are individual organizations and usefulness of support activities have to be evaluated according to the actual situation of the company. International experience of manager has effect on the use of support activities. SMEs identified many problems related to pillars of Institutional theory and regulative environment seems to be the most challenging one.

Siilot organisaatiokulttuurisena ilmentymänä

Organisaatioiden siiloutuminen on monissa yhteyksissä todettu haasteeksi, jopa kansalliseksi tuottavuusongelmaksi. Organisaatiokulttuurin voimaan kiinnitetään kasvavassa määrin huomiota myös johtamistutkimuksessa. Tämän työn tavoitteena oli tutkia organisaatioteorian eri lähestymistapojen kautta organisaatiokulttuuria ja sen yhteyttä yhtiöstrategian toteuttamiseen asiantuntijaorganisaatiossa, sekä tarkentaa siiloutumista tukevia ja toisaalta yhtenäisen organisaatiokulttuurin kehittymiseen vaikuttavia tekijöitä elinkeinoyhtiökontekstissa. Tutkimus toteutettiin kvalitatiivisena tapaustutkimuksena seudullisessa elinkeinoyhtiössä. Tutkimusmenetelmänä käytettiin puolistrukturoitua teemahaastattelua. Tutkimuksessa haastateltiin kohdeorganisaation eri yksiköt huomioiden asiakasrajapinnassa toimivaa henkilöstöä, jolla on keskeinen rooli yhtiöstrategian käytännön toteutuksessa. Tutkimuksen tuloksina tunnistettiin asiantuntijaorganisaation sisäisiin rajoihin liittyviä haasteita ja siilomaiseen toimintaan johtavia organisaatiokulttuurisia syitä sekä esitettiin keinoja siilojen poistamiseen. Tutkimuksen tuloksena kiteytettiin myös organisaatiokulttuurisia aktioita, joilla voidaan edistää strategian toteuttamista asiantuntijaorganisaatiossa. Lisäksi tutkimus antoi uutta tutkimuksellista tietoa siiloista tutkimuskohteena olleen elinkeinoyhtiön toimintaympäristön kautta. Tutkimuksen perusteella elinkeinoyhtiökontekstin vaikutukset heijastuvat organisaatiokulttuurissa siiloja ja siiloutumista vahvistavana keskeisimmin kolmesta syystä, joita ovat: 1) julkiselle kehittämisorganisaatiolle asetetut laajat ja osin erisuuntaiset tehtävät, 2) kuntarahoittajien ja yritysasiakkaiden asiakkuusroolien erilaisuus sekä 3) julkisella hankerahoituksella toteutettavat projektit.

Fuzzy ontology for knowledge mobilisation and decision support

A growing concern for organisations is how they should deal with increasing amounts of collected data. With fierce competition and smaller margins, organisations that are able to fully realize the potential in the data they collect can gain an advantage over the competitors. It is almost impossible to avoid imprecision when processing large amounts of data. Still, many of the available information systems are not capable of handling imprecise data, even though it can offer various advantages. Expert knowledge stored as linguistic expressions is a good example of imprecise but valuable data, i.e. data that is hard to exactly pinpoint to a definitive value. There is an obvious concern among organisations on how this problem should be handled; finding new methods for processing and storing imprecise data are therefore a key issue. Additionally, it is equally important to show that tacit knowledge and imprecise data can be used with success, which encourages organisations to analyse their imprecise data. The objective of the research conducted was therefore to explore how fuzzy ontologies could facilitate the exploitation and mobilisation of tacit knowledge and imprecise data in organisational and operational decision making processes. The thesis introduces both practical and theoretical advances on how fuzzy logic, ontologies (fuzzy ontologies) and OWA operators can be utilized for different decision making problems. It is demonstrated how a fuzzy ontology can model tacit knowledge which was collected from wine connoisseurs. The approach can be generalised and applied also to other practically important problems, such as intrusion detection. Additionally, a fuzzy ontology is applied in a novel consensus model for group decision making. By combining the fuzzy ontology with Semantic Web affiliated techniques novel applications have been designed. These applications show how the mobilisation of knowledge can successfully utilize also imprecise data. An important part of decision making processes is undeniably aggregation, which in combination with a fuzzy ontology provides a promising basis for demonstrating the benefits that one can retrieve from handling imprecise data. The new aggregation operators defined in the thesis often provide new possibilities to handle imprecision and expert opinions. This is demonstrated through both theoretical examples and practical implementations. This thesis shows the benefits of utilizing all the available data one possess, including imprecise data. By combining the concept of fuzzy ontology with the Semantic Web movement, it aspires to show the corporate world and industry the benefits of embracing fuzzy ontologies and imprecision.

Customer value assessment in business markets

Understanding how firms create, communicate, and deliver value to customers is a key factor when firms seek to differentiate in increasingly competitive and commoditized business markets. As product and price have become less important differentiators in many industries, suppliers are increasingly seeking ways to differentiate themselves based on delivered customer value. Therefore, to gain a holistic understanding on what their offerings are worth to the customer, suppliers need to conduct customer value assessment, which quantifies the impact of a supplier´s offering to customers’ costs and returns. However, from a managerial perspective, customer value assessment is the single most critical challenge for firms in business markets. Consequently, developing holistic frameworks for customer value assessment is seen as one of the most important research priorities for marketing research. The purpose of this study is to explore the process of customer value assessment in business markets. Business markets represent a context where an increasing number of industrial firms are transitioning from basic product offerings towards service-based and solution-oriented hybrid offerings, which emphasize value co-creation and realization in the long term, thus making it difficult to quantify their monetary value. This study employs exploratory and qualitative research design by applying inductive and discovery-oriented grounded theory and multiple case research methods. The empirical data comprise interviews with 61 managers from 12 industrial firms, including seven best practice firms in customer value assessment. The findings of this study show that customer value assessment is essentially a crossfunctional process, which involves several organizational functions. The process begins well before and continues long after the actual delivery, often until the end of a supplier´s offering’s life-cycle. Furthermore, the findings shed light on alternative strategies that firms in business markets can adopt to implement the customer value assessment process. Overall, the findings contribute to customer value research, the sales and organizational management literature, the service marketing and solutions business literature, and suggest several managerial implications on how firms in business markets can adopt a holistic approach to assess value created for customers.

Esimies osaamisen mahdollistajana

Tämän pro gradu -tutkielman tavoitteena oli esitellä ja analysoida osaami-sen johtamista sekä tuottaa käytännön suosituksia Alko Oy:n myymälöiden lähiesimiehille heidän henkilökuntansa osaamisen kehittämiseksi. Tämän lisäksi tutkimuksessa pyrittiin kerätyn aineiston avulla luomaan ymmärrys siitä, miten osaamisen johtamiset keinot vaikuttavat asiakastyytyväisyyteen. Tutkimus toteutettiin vertailevana tapaustutkimuksena ja tutkimusaineistoa kerättiin sekä kvantitatiivisella että kvalitatiivisella tutkimusmenetelmällä. Kohdeyrityksen myyjille lähetettiin kyselylomake heidän esimiestensä osaamisen johtamisen toimista, ja kyselystä saadun tiedon syventämiseksi haastateltiin kahdeksaa myymäläpäällikköä osaamisen johtamisen teemoista. Tutkimuksen perusteella pystyttiin muodostaman käsitys siitä, mistä osaa-misen johtaminen koostuu ja miten paremman ja heikomman osaamisen omaavien myymälöiden esimiesten toimet eroavat toisistaan. Vastausten perusteella saatiin myös ymmärrys niistä osa-alueista, joita kohdeyrityksen esimiesten toiminnassa pitäisi pyrkiä kehittämään. Osaamisen kehittämisen perustan muodostavat esimiehen oma esimerkki ja oppimiseen kannustava ilmapiiri. Esimies, joka onnistuu suuntaamaan henkilökuntansa oppimisen tukemaan organisaation tavoitteita, osaa henkilökohtaistaa yhtiön strategian sopimaan jokaisen toimenkuvaan. Oppimisen tukemisessa vaaditaan esimieheltä vahvaa henkilökunnan tuntemusta, tavoitteiden asettamista ja niiden toteutumisen seurantaa. Tutkimus osoitti esimiesten olevan pääsääntöisesti innostuneita työstään ja onnistuvan osaamisen suuntaamisen toimissa hyvin. Esimiehet voisivat kehittää toimintaansa ottamalla oman henkilökuntansa mukaan toiminnan suunnitteluun ja vastuuttamalla heitä myymälän toiminnan ja oman ammattitaitonsa jatkuvaan kehittämiseen.

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

Task Force on Librarians’ Competencies in Support of E-Research and Scholarly Communication

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

Towards multi bibliographic format support in Invenio

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

Using ArchivesSpace to Support Research Data Curation

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

ORCIDs in the Wild: Implementing ORCIDs into Research Support and Repository Systems

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