Episodes
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What can large corporations and start-ups learn from each other? How do you make circular economy work in the pharmaceutical industry? And how do you foster creativity in that business?
These are some of the questions that Sif Bregnballe and Laura Karppinen set out to investigate in their thesis. We also touch upon their process of writing a thesis when almost exclusively meeting online, as well as their take on what is important to keep in mind when you have to find a thesis partner.
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Do you know what a Food Science Park looks like? Johannes (Joe) Neft and Hedvig Henrekson have investigated how being part of such a science park influences product innovation for its tenants. We talk about the main takeaways of their thesis both content-related and personal, their insights and whether being good friends is actually beneficial for writing a thesis together.
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Episodes manquant?
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Navigating your own business during a global pandemic while writing a thesis about the consequences of said pandemic simultaneously can be... challenging. This week’s guest, Luis Xavier Mariscal, tells us all about how the process of writing his thesis actually helped him with his work in his own company. We also touch upon the struggles of splitting up with your thesis partner, how to stay focused when your mind tends to go wondering and how one’s definition of a company can help you see things in new perspective.
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Laura Katzensteiner and Signe Dreyer Elkjær have taken the buzzword sustainability into an academically very unresearched field. In their thesis, they dealt with the question of how accelerators actually integrate sustainability into their business models. They tell us how they approached this topic, how they managed to stay productive during lockdown and how they finally designed a framework that answers their research question.
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Jakub Taptik and Catrine Bek are guiding us through the many ups and downs of their nail-biting thesis process. We talk about how on earth they could write an entire discussion in 24 hours, and how they managed to get a high grade when they haven't even read the entire thesis before they handed it in. Their tips will save your ass.
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New hosts. New guests. New topics.
Listen in to hear what The Thesis Talks is all about and what's new! -
How can universities collaborate on innovation in a meaningful and efficient way? And how should we speak about collaboration to truly incentivize strong and active relationships? Language is one core element that frames our understanding and thus our bahavior with collaboration. The Triple Helix functioned as guiding theory to detect this language of collaboration.
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Despite value co-creation becoming an increasingly common practice, the knowledge of how co- creation is enabled in business-to-business contexts remains scant. Therefore, this thesis seeks to enrich the understanding of the drivers and facilitators that influence the co-creation process to inform the knowledge gap of how value co-creation is enabled. Guided by the research question - how can incumbent firms within the financial services industry enable value co-creation activities with fintechs? – a case study of a bank’s collaborations with two fintechs is conducted to relate theory to practice. This thesis thus investigates the enablers to value co-creation by applying the theoretical lenses of the resource-based view, ecosystem theory, absorptive capacity, inter-organisational knowledge transfer and organisational learning, which collectively provide insights on the value co-creation process. As a result, the thesis puts forward an overview of the value co-creation process divided into three stages, along with the essential enablers relating to each stage. Based on insights from this research, we contribute to the academic literature on how business to business value co-creation is enabled.
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This master’s thesis examines the decisive organizational factors for practising a successful innovation culture in Danish Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). An extensive amount of literature on the field of innovation, organizational culture and innovation culture have been reviewed, and the relevant literature has by a deductive approach been used as a framework. A comparative case study has been chosen as a strategy to research the field of innovation culture, and here, mixed methods have been used to collect empirical data for the research. Quantitative data have been collected by the use of surveys, and qualitative data have conducted via semi-structured interviews with respondents from six different SMEs in the comparative case study. SMEs have been chosen as cases due to the importance of SMEs in the Danish business industry, and the cases were chosen from Børsen’s gazelle list in 2018. The collected quantitative and qualitative data have been analysed by the use of the framework from the reviewed literature of innovation, organizational culture and innovation culture. Moreover, three business cases from major global companies have been used in the analysis as a framework of how to practise a successful innovation culture. The findings from the analysis have been discussed, and from here it can be concluded that shared basic values are an important decisive factor and the means to create shared basic values are done by the use of artefacts and norms. Furthermore, it can be concluded that the culture in SMEs needs to be built and it needs to be valuable. Risk-taking, encouragement and reward of new ideas in the organization can also be concluded to be decisive organizational factors. Furthermore, a people-centric approach is, in general, a very important approach for SMEs and finally, to hire diverse and creative people, be customer-driven and create a foundation for open innovation can also be concluded to be important for a successful innovation culture in SMEs. However, these principles and approaches can be practised in numerous ways depending on the individual SME.
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Artmoney is not a currency for people interested in art, it's a currency for people interested in people. As an alternative currency, the burning question is "Why are people using the currency?" In this episode we are dissecting the value and the aim of an alternative currency such as Artmoney.
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With increasing diversity at the workplace, it becomes essential for businesses to find out how that diversity can be used as a competitive advantage. Addressing a gap in the literature, this thesis explores how diversity in companies may be leveraged through dialogue: what are the benefits and challenges, and how may it be done in practice?
Taking a critical realist approach, the theories of Thomas & Ely (1996) on diversity and of Isaacs (1999) on dialogue are linked as the basis for qualitative research in three knowledge-heavy companies within banking, tech and pharma, where 10 managers and employees have been interviewed.
The findings indicate that dialogue is being used to leverage diversity with great corporate benefits, but rarely methodologically and systematically. The companies also encounter challenges, several of which may stem from business rationales that are at odds with rationales inherent to a dialogical approach, and we have applied the concept of institutional logics to shed light on this. The findings further suggest that a more conscious, strategic use of dialogue combined with inclusive thinking may increase the benefits of diversity.
Future research may include what it may mean to the shape and form of dialogue that employees are often spread over large geographical distances and how that, in turn, may affect the effectiveness of dialogue. -
Can we outsource knowledge to Big Data to scale a business to the next level - especially when it captures such precious information such as the one about our brain? Mads investigated this question while seizing the opportunity to do some self exploration of his brain activities; The case of a neurofeedback clinic
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Within the recent hype surrounding blockchain technology, not much attention has been given to the question if there is a potential use for social businesses. Based on an extended PESTEL analysis, Julia derives opportunities and challenges for organizations with a social-impact agenda and finishes off with concrete steps for the implementation of blockchain - a real hands-on manual!
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The food industry - a complex world of actors which creates conditions for resource waste. Emerging digital platforms such as Fresh.Land, ToGoodToGo or Platjammer sprout in Copenhagen at the moment. With a fresh approach and innovative business models, they reshape an inefficient food supply chain and thereby show consumers and traditional market players how to move towards a future without (or with less) food waste.
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Why did Nintendo Wii and the first Apple phone go through the roof? Because Apple and Nintendo performed radical innovation and envisioned new product-meanings. In this episode, Michael takes us on a journey of finding product-meanings of communication mediums through the use of metaphors. Meanings are embedded in the metaphors we use: So, what colour is a phone call and what transportation means are emails?
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The purpose of this project was to understand how social enterprises in Mexico are a mean to reduce poverty. This because the notion of social entrepreneurship has shown to effectively contribute with innovative and effective solutions using a range of organizational formats to maximize social impact and bring about change (Nicholls & Cho, 2006); nevertheless, the concept itself has only been recently recognized in Mexico and therefore the research is still new and limited (Conaway, 2018).My study is of qualitative and exploratory nature and follows an inductive research approach. Over one-month fieldwork to the regions of Mexico City and Guadalajara, research was conducted on ten case studies of social enterprises from distinct sectors that are part of the social field.By uncovering determinant approaches towards social value creation, understanding the different attributes of social enterprises business models, and analyzing supportive elements in the social entrepreneurial ecosystem, this study identified how the study cases impact positively communities and scale its solutions.It was concluded that actors aiming to social justice should reconsider their perspective in regards to the country's social situation and adopt a fact-based worldview (Rosling et al., 2018) that will enable them to acknowledge more realistic real situation, make informed decisions, and achieve a more significant result. Finally, the study closes underlying the importance of achieving social change through the collaborative effort of a whole social-oriented community rather than the result of individual efforts.
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In this BONUS episode we talk to MSO Professor in an open event at CBS Library forum on fieldwork, and specifically doing fieldwork abroad. We (Lena & Doa) were lucky to have Mark as our supervisor and learn from his experiences abroad that we could take with us when we went to Kenya a year ago for our fieldwork. Listen as he tells us why it is important, doing quantitative and qualitative analysis “in the field”, and ethical considerations to take into account. For the purpose of duration and keeping it sharp we cut out Mark’s stories from his fieldwork to focus on his pep talk and what considerations you as a master thesis student should take into account if you want to do field work abroad for you thesis! Enjoy and if any questions you’re always welcome to write to us!
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This work investigates the role of interorganizational proximities (IOP), knowledge attributes and organizational learning dynamics in innovation collaboration (IC) among startups and large firms. In the context where knowledge is seen as a pivotal resource in building and maintaining a sustainable competitive advantage, both large firms and startups aim to access new expertise which they cannot produce behind closed doors, through mutual collaboration.
We have developed three main theoretical pillars, allowing for the construction of a deep understanding of the innovation collaboration between startups and large firms. Firstly, on an actor-level, by contextualizing IC and inquiring into the main motives different actors have for participating in IC. Secondly, on a level of dyad, investigating interorganizational proximities’ role in organizational learning and thirdly by testing the validity of Contractor and Ra’s (2002) theoretical framework, which heedfully brings together our interest in organizational learning dynamics in IC and types of IC governance.
Using a critical-realist point of view, the aim of the thesis is to confirm or refute the aforementioned theory by comparing it to the observed results gathered on the case study of SoundHub Denmark, which is an example of IC between startups and large firms in sound tech sector. This “real life” case was explored through an empirical and qualitative investigation utilizing nine semi-structured interviews with experts involved in the SoundHub IC. -
The urgency to act towards more circular practices has been set by the European political agenda but still many initiatives fail to address Circular Economy from a system perspective and reshape our Linear Economy. Kristine researched on Danish small & medium sized companies which push Circular Economy models through technological innovations.
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In the last 5 years the number of immigrants in Denmark has increased and so did the number of foreign enterprises. In his thesis, Gor noticed the creation of immigrant entrepreneurial “communities” and main challenges that they are facing. Further, some Denmark-specific challenges were found such as building a network from scratch and the Danish language.
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