S2E1 - A new season

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.