master thesis Archives - MSPI - Master's in Sustainable Product-Service System Innovation

Business Model Framework for Open Innovation projects in Incumbent organizations: A study on Incumbent organization in Sweden

Christian Johansson — Tue, 07 May 2019 12:12:34 +0000

Karthik Battula has completed his master thesis on the MSPI program. The thesis was conducted in collaboration with Ericsson and focuses on a concept called Minimum Viable Business Models as an approach to facilitate early stage Open Innovation and business model generation in innovation projects.

The title of the thesis is: Business Model Framework for Open Innovation projects in Incumbent organizations: A study on Incumbent organization in Sweden

Download the thesis here: http://bth.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:1313883

Abstract

This thesis is about exploring the suitable business model framework for open innovation projects in incumbent organizations like Ericsson. Due to the rise in global competition and digitalization incumbent companies cannot innovate in closed innovation systems. Open innovation accelerates the flow of internal and external knowledge for expanding to the new markets by the use of innovation. Companies need reliable and working tools to innovate their business models.

Along with technological innovation, business models also play a dominant role in businesses. Companies need to protect their business models by building them strong. Through making them hard to replicate for placing companies ahead of their competition. Companies employ the business model to understand value creation, delivery, and capture mechanisms. Open innovation explicitly incorporates the business model as a source of both value creation and value capture. Later role of the business model is to enable the organization to sustain its position in the industry(West et al. 2006).

The content of the thesis is explaining how the early stage startups and innovation projects are building their business models in incumbent organizations — then developing a suitable business model framework for such projects in incumbent organizations to building their business ideas. Using design thinking methodologies proposed a business modeling approach with existing tools from the literature for creating a viable business model and using a value-based approach to quantify the value propositions by understanding value delivered to the customer and developing capturing model. By converting those values in monetary terms, it makes it easy to propose a value-based price for the solution. Through this thesis, the author has introduced a framework and process model for business modeling by early stage projects. The contributions were in empirical findings and analysis focused on design thinking-based business modeling approach for MVBM framework and process model.

Keywords

Business model, open innovation, value propositions, business model innovation, business strategy, value creation

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Supporting product development with a tangible platform for simulating user scenarios

Christian Johansson — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 11:45:03 +0000

Ryan Ruvald has completed his thesis on using scale models as prototyping design supports in product development. Download it here: Link to record on the DiVA portal.

Abstract

Motivation:

Today’s sustainability challenges are increasingly being addressed by Product Service Systems to satisfy customers needs while lowering their overall environment impact. These systems are increasingly complex containing diverse artifacts and interactions. To provide a holistic solution centered on the human experience element, design of product-service systems are best driven by data gathered from design thinking methods.

Problem:

When considering innovation challenges, such as the deployment of autonomous electric machines on future construction sites, data driven design can suffer from a lack of available tangible user feedback upon which to make design decisions.

Approach:

In the case of this study, the development of a scaled down construction site structured around generally applicable operations was built as a prototype for involving various users in early phase development of a HMI for interacting with prototype machines built by Volvo CE called the HX01. Qualitative data acquisition methods were derived from Design Thinking approaches to needfinding including: a questionnaire, unstructured interviews and observations.

Results:

The prototype scale site became a 5 meter x 5 meter semi-portable site with 1:11 scale ratio machines including: excavators, wheeled loaders and autonomous haulers. The product tested with the site was an augmented reality interface to provide a communication platform between workers and the autonomous haulers designed at building trust to enable collaboration. Test users and observers provided feedback confirming the effectiveness of the scale site scenario to convey the necessary context of a realistic interaction experience. Beyond HMI testing, the site served as a tangible artifact to instigate conversations across domain boundaries.

Conclusions:

The tangible experiential scenario platform developed displayed the capability to go beyond one-way concept communication of concepts to customers, by including customers as integral participants in the testing of new products/services. For design teams, the site can facilitate deeper learnings and validation via a shared contextualization of user feedback. The further implications may also include: the ability to increase rationale at design decision gate’s assessment of risk in new products and enable the identification of emergent issues in complex future scenarios.

Keywords

Experiential Prototyping, Empathic Design, Data-Driven Design, Knowledge Sharing, Autonomy, Augmented Reality

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MSPI Class of 2017 Theses

Christian Johansson — Sun, 15 Oct 2017 15:12:12 +0000

These are the final theses of the MSPI Class of 2017, please find the download links to BTH’s DIVA portal.

Xin Yi

Data visualization in conceptual design: developing a prototype for complex data visualization

Ryan Ruvald

Supporting product development with a tangible platform for simulating user scenarios

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Data visualization in conceptual design: developing a prototype for complex data visualization

Christian Johansson — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 12:58:25 +0000

Xin Yi has completed her Master Thesis on Data visualisation. Download it here: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-15192

Abstract [en]

In today’s highly competitive industries, engineers are driven to not only design a better product to fulfill users’ needs but also demanded to develop a product in a short time to occupy the market. With the development of data collection and visualization technology, the application of data visualization into product development to enhance the ability of better product design is a significant trend.

Data visualization becomes more and more important since it could illustrate the valuable information, such as tacit needs and patterns which hidden from data, in a communicated way to help engineers get more inspiration for the conceptual design.

It is not hard to collect data; however, the challenge is to visualize the valuable information from a large number of data concisely and intuitively. In recent years, there are some visualization techniques available for product design, while, most of them are implemented in the later stage of product development, few methods are applicable for conceptual design. Therefore, this thesis is carried out to explore appropriate visualization techniques to provide support for conceptual design.

The aim of this thesis is, in an engineering environment, to investigate ways to visualize complex data legibly and intuitively to enhance engineers’ ability for conceptual design from better understanding the current machine. In order to achieve the objective, a conceptual design case of the improvement of wheel loader fuel consumption is applied, which consisted of plenty of data sets within various parameters, to explore how to reveal the hidden information of complex data for engineers.

As the result of this thesis, a prototype contains a series of visualization techniques is proposed to demonstrate data information from a wheel loader under several visualization situations. The final prototype has the functions of visualizing different operations separately; visualizing the overall fuel consumption in one operation; cluster’s patterns visualization; visualizing the impact of one variable on the whole value.

Keywords

complex multidimensional data visualization, insight gathering, conceptual engineering design, prototype

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Lions Jarramas stipend for Yasmeen Jaghbeer and Yvonne Motyka

Christian Johansson — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 12:00:33 +0000

For the second year running, Lions Jarramas offers two stipends to thesis students from the MSPI- and MSLS programs who makes a contribution towards a more sustainable society.

The Lions Jarramas Stipend

To support our international students coming to Sweden from far away to learn about sustainable development and to support a more sustainable society, Lions Jarramas in Karlskrona offers, for the second year running, two stipends of 10.000 SEK each.

This year’s winners

This year from MSPI Yasmeen Jaghbeer and Yvonne Motyka have been awarded a stipend of 10.000 SEK for their thesis “Roadmap towards a Lean and Sustainable Production for Medium Sized Manufacturers: A Case Study”.

For MSLS, Méabh Carey, Alex Harned, and Dayna Stein have been awarded 10.000 SEK for their thesis “Addressing Food Waste as a Contribution to Strategic Sustainable Development within Vancouver, BC.”

We congratulate the students on their work, and extend our gratitude to Lions for their valuable contribution to our students!

Lions Club Jarramas was founded in 1979 in Karlskrona and currently has about 55 members. Their mission is contribute towards a better and more humane world. Their annual activities includes the Lions Train during the summer in Karlskrona, the Garden Fair (Trädgårdsmässa) in Wämöparken in May, and Bubbetorps Christmas Market in December.

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Lean and sustainable production of roller blinds

Christian Johansson — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 15:00:09 +0000

Yasmeen Jaghbeer and Yvonne Motyka have investigated how Markisol can increase their production efficiency by focusing on lean and sustainability principles.

About the project

Thesis name: Roadmap towards a lean and sustainable production for medium sized manufacturers: a case study

Students: Yasmeen Jaghbeer, Yvonne Motyka

Partner company: Markisol Holding AB

Programs: MSPI, Mechanical Engineering (course: MT2540 Master thesis, TE2501 (Master Thesis))

Find the report: Download here!

Project prompt

The aim is to investigate how medium sized manufacturers can increase their production efficiency and move strategically towards sustainability. The primary purpose is to provide recommendations on how to improve the production efficiency and sustainability of Markisol operations.

Solution – Lean and sustainable roadmap for roller blinds production

The lean and sustainable roadmap for Marksiol, and the roadmap guidelines for creating a lean and sustainable roadmap in medium-sized manufacturers.

Executive Summary

Introduction

Trends such as globalization, increased customer demand, and rising sustainability challenges are greatly affecting medium-sized manufacturers. To survive in today’s market, manufacturers are forced to rethink and improve their production processes.

Lean and Sustainable production are becoming an expected feature of today’s manufacturing systems. A powerful methodology in Lean Production is Value Stream Mapping (VSM). While in the quest for sustainable development, several approaches and tools emerged over the years, such as Cleaner Production (CP), Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD), and Life Cycle Analysis (LCA). However, it is argued that most of the tools and concepts are too complicated and time-consuming to fit medium-sized manufacturers.

Roller blinds production

Overall aim and purpose

The overall aim of this thesis is to investigate how medium-sized manufacturers can improve their production and sustainability performances using appropriate tools from the lean manufacturing and sustainable development literature. Further, a roadmap development process to assist them should be provided. The research took place at a medium sized company, Markisol Holding AB, which works mainly within the roller blinds industry. The company prepares to introduce lean production into its operations and has an open eye for sustainability improvements to cope with their customer requirements. However, there is a need for a more structured view on what is going on inside the production and what can be enhanced from both a lean and sustainability point of view. Thus, a primary purpose of this thesis is to provide recommendations on how to improve the production efficiency and sustainability of Markisol Holding AB operations.

Research Questions

The main research question is:

How could a lean and Sustainable production roadmap be created for a medium sized manufacturer?

Two sub-research questions were formulated to answer the main research question:

RQ (1): How could the Value Stream Mapping be used in a medium sized manufacturer to reduce the sources of waste in production?

RQ (2): How could the production in a medium sized manufacturer be assessed with respect to the overarching sustainability principles?

Approaches and Methods

The research was designed as a case study, where a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods was used for data collection and data analysis. The quantitative methods mainly consist of time and work in progress measurements, while the qualitative methods included interviews, dialogues, and observations.
Different methods and tools were used in different parts of the work to fulfill the thesis purpose. VSM was used to provide a blueprint of the production processes and improve the production performance. A mix of Sustainability Life Cycle Analysis (SLCA) and Sustainability Compliance Index (SCI) was used to uncover the sustainability challenges and enhance the sustainability performances.

Results and Discussion

The first part of the results describes how VSM can be used to visualize the material and information flows, from the reception of materials from suppliers until the shipment of finished goods in a medium-sized manufacturer. Taking into consideration all the processes the product goes through on the production floor on a door-to-door level.

Through interviewing the customer, the value was defined as the delivery time and costs. Accordingly, the value-added and non-value-added activities in production could be determined at a later stage in the analysis. Afterward, a product family was selected, and mapping the current state VSM for the typical product at the case company took place. It is found that the value-added time is about 3.2 hours out of the production lead time which is 228.8 hours. To improve the situation, analysis of the VSM was performed according to the eight guiding questions from the VSM literature, combined with the process-level waste analysis, to identify the sources of waste and maximize the improvement potential. The amount of waste was surprising, with the majority of the waste classified under the following categories; incorrect processing, unnecessary motion and waiting. Finally, a future state map was proposed with the adequate improvements indicated.

In the second part of this case study results, a combination of tools has been utilized to assess the production with regards to the sustainability principles. The SLCA tool was adopted to explore how the current production lines appear from a strategic sustainability perspective through the questions and answers template. For each sustainability principle, a set of questions was created to provide a holistic understanding of the current situation. Interviews with management and production were conducted to fill the SLCA template. The answers were then analyzed further using the Sustainability Compliance Index (SCI) matrix. For the current level of compliance was found to be an excellent level (SCI 9), good level (SCI 6) for the second and third ecological sustainability principles respectively, which is related to the buildup chemicals produced by society, and degradation of nature by physical means. However, lower compliance levels (SCI 3) were revealed for the first ecological principle concerned with the buildup of substances extracted from the earth crust and the social sustainability principles. Respectively, higher future sustainability levels could be attained in the production. Suggestions were provided to shift the case company from a relatively low level into an excellent and high compliance levels for the first and social sustainability principles respectively.

Production and sustainability performance suggestions were analyzed and discussed with the production development and the management to assure their feasibility and applicability. Accordingly, a roadmap was provided to the case company with clear milestones and actions distributed in one year, the summary of the main improvements can be seen in the below table.

Expected improvements in key production and sustainability performances.

Furthermore, the social aspects regarding employee satisfaction, teamwork, and group dynamics will be enhanced by introducing the rotational system, better ergonomics at working stations and the safety plan.

Conclusion

The used tools for the lean and sustainability assessment proved to satisfy the intended purpose of assessing the production according to the lean and sustainability principles for a medium-sized manufacturer. The lean parameters can be considered as operational indicators for sustainability.

However, the lean efforts alone are not sufficient to cope with today ́s evolving trends and the increased sustainability requirements. To be able to cope with it, it is essential to complement the lean initiatives with a sustainability assessment effort to generate ultimate improvement potentials. The taken approach and analysis through building the roadmap was found to be effective through comparing it to the management ́s expectations and perceptions of the approach, and to both quantitative and qualitative measures from the literature. These comparisons indicate that the achieved roadmap is easy to create for medium sized manufacturers, and it holds substantial improvement potentials in their journey towards being a lean and sustainable manufacturers.

The guidelines for developing the lean- and sustainable production roadmap in medium-sized manufacturers are presented in the figure below.

Lean- and Sustainable production roadmap development guidelines.

The findings of this work are seen to be of high generalizability to other medium-sized manufacturers seeking to increase their production and sustainability performances. Further research and more empirical case studies are needed in the area of lean and Sustainable manufacturing.

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Affordable and sustainable facilities for companies

Christian Johansson — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 13:00:46 +0000

Andreas Persson and Daniel Holmberg have looked into how to achieve more affordable and sustainable industrial facilities for small- and medium-sized companies in Karlskrona. Kruthusen Företagsfastigheter AB was the project owner.

About the project

Topic: How to create affordable and sustainable facilities for companies
Students: Andreas Persson, Daniel Holmberg
Partner company: Kruthusen Företagsfastigheter AB
Program: M.Sc. Mechanical Engineering
Course: TE2501 – Master Thesis

Project prompt

The rent per square meter and year of an old facility is approximately 500-550 SEK, for newly built facilities with today’s building methods the price is in excess of 1000 SEK/m2. This makes these new facilities less attractive if not unaffordable for most companies. To reduce the rent Kruthusen Företagsfastigheter AB wants to explore different methods.

Solution – Flexible facilities

A new compact building with shared common areas has been created. The focus has been not only on the tenants but also on their customers. Therefore, more efficient parking and customer reception has been improved. The meeting itself with the customer has also been improved by adding a conference room. The materials chosen for the building have been selected by sustainability- and performance factor.

Today big costs are connected with companies’ changing facilities which often require reconstruction or similar. Some needs extra bathrooms, some needs kitchen and some does not need any of it. Therefore, to save a lot of money on reconstruction a common area will be built where there will be a dressing room with showers, WC and a shared kitchen.

There are many different ways to save energy which also reduces costs. Research has been made to see if there are other alternatives to heat the building. However, district heating is available in the area where the new facility will be built which is a sustainable choice and therefore was selected. Heat losses for the new building were calculated to see if it is enough to target operational costs to be able to secure a low rent. The result was that a high amount of the heat losses can be reduced but it is not alone enough to allow affordable rents. The total cost of the building could not be estimated by us, which is the reason why other measures like common areas cannot be proven to lower the rent to the targeted value. If the concept is affordable will be shown when the concept is sent to a construction company for cost estimation.

The final building will include a common area in the middle at the entrance and 10 rooms for renting that will be 8×13 meters. To make it easier for the customers a parking lot will be built in front of the building. On the back side every company will have an area, for trucks and other work-related vehicles. Also a spot for containers will be included for extra storage for each renting company.

More illustrations

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Trainee and internship

Christian Johansson — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 08:44:25 +0000

Applying for a trainee or internship position can be an excellent start to your career. Here there may be many opportunities to advance in the company.

Explore possible opportunities via the links below.

Thesis opportunities:

Exjobb.com

Career development programs:

AIESEC

Internships:

Trainee positions:

Job search engines:

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MSPI Master Thesis Presentations 2015

Christian Johansson — Mon, 08 Jun 2015 14:49:48 +0000

MSPI Master thesis presentations
Thursday June 11 13:00 – 15:00
Location: A303 Monsunen

13:00 – 13:30
Title: Building Business Model to Help Karskrona Makerspace Increase Funding and Sell Memberships
Presenter: Xin Li
Opponent: Filippo Lee

13:30 – 14:00
Title: The opportunities of data utilization in the Internet-based weather forecast company
Presenter: Jun Che
Opponent: Cheng Tao

14:00 – 14:30
Title: PSS for Functional Offering of Automotive Fixtures using Knowledge Enabled Engineering Techniques
Presenter: Filippo Lee
Opponent: Jun Che

14:30 – 15:00
Title: Support of decision-making in preliminary design of product-service systems by value models
Presenter: Cheng Tao
Opponent: Xin Li

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Thesis and project collaboration

Tobias Larsson — Sun, 03 May 2015 21:59:46 +0000

The MSPI-program with its interdisciplinary approach invites industries for collaboration, and also to partner in a variety of activities within MSPI.

Projects with MSPI

Numerous course projects and thesis projects have been done by MSPI by the requests of company partners through on-going collaboration. Some examples of areas that the projects have focused:

Unleashing student creativity to explore new innovation opportunities around a new product concept.
Exploring innovations that improve the sustainability aspects of a current product or service.
Learning how sustainability can be a driver for innovation processes.
Developing existing products into product-service systems with the intent of increasing revenue by providing more value to partners.

Great opportunities for projects

Because of the diversity of experiences and richness in background knowledge of the students, there are great opportunities for design projects that need a fresh perspective. Some of the collaboration opportunities are listed below:

One-time student projects
On-going projects in various MSPI courses
Master’s thesis projects
MSPI Programme sponsorship
Student scholarship sponsorship

More information

To get more information about some of the projects that have been done in MSPI so far, please refer to the course project and MSc Thesis archives.

If you want to with us on projects, please contact us.

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