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The research focuses on examining how the industry-level challenges and features of Finnish fashion influence the internationalisation process of Finnish fashion firms, and do the challenges related to profiting from innovation contribute to this relationship. The author argues that the industry-level challenges have an effect on the Finnish fashion firms’ possibilities to profit from innovation. The research aims to form an understanding of the state of internationalisation of Finnish fashion firms, identify and describe the challenges, and find means to overcome them. The study has been conducted as a qualitative case study, in which the author has combined data from previous research literature with new empirical data collected from interviews of four case companies. Three of the case companies are small Finnish fashion firms at different stages of internationalisation. In addition a Swedish fashion firm which has succeeded in the international markets was interviewed for a comparison. The theoretical framework was formed by combining internationalisation discussion with profiting from innovation research, and then applied in the context of Finnish fashion industry. The findings of this study indicate that the majority of Finnish fashion firms’ challenges concerning profiting from innovation in international markets originate from the industry-level challenges and features. The industry-level challenges influence the firms’ complementary assets and capabilities that are critical in terms of capturing the value from an innovation. This in turn has in turn contributes to the relationship and escalates the effect the industry-level challenges have on the internationalisation of Finnish fashion firms by strengthening their hindering impact. The empirical examination also revealed that Finnish fashion entrepreneurs do not consider themselves as innovators or their products as innovations. This can have a significant impact on the fashion firms’ abilities to profit from their innovations. Previous research on the industry-level challenges and features of Finnish fashion is rather limited, and this study contributes to the discussion concerning the impact they have on individual firms. This study also examines the phenomenon from a new perspective by applying Teece’s (1986) seminal profiting from innovation model to the fashion industry. The results of this study can be used to enhance the internationalisation possibilities of Finnish fashion firms.

Exporting is one of the most commonly used modes of international business operations and significant option to all sizes of companies considering foreign market penetration. As many cross-national policy makers encourages countries to open their trade barriers for free product trade, the global environment has gradually shifted in favor of using exporting as a foreign business operation mode. This research focuses on product exportation and distinguishes it from service exports whereas differences may occur. The research contains a pre-assumption that the process of product exportation in business-to-business markets can be managed with universally best practices and the process for efficient exporting management can be found and described.

Humor is important human behavior that plays a vital role in communication and social interactions. Being a social phenomenon, humor is pervasive in organizations and workplaces. Because of its playful nature and the amusement it engenders, its presence in organizations is usually seen a distraction. Traditionally, work has been conceived as a serious undertaking hence any seemingly frivolous behavior like humor should not form part of it. However, it has been suggested that humor has numerous benefits and facilitates organizational processes such as innovation. Unfortunately, there are few studies that have examined the role of humor in innovation. This study seeks to deepen understanding of humor’s utility in innovation management by exploring how individuals use of humor in different contexts affect their innovativeness. The study draws on humor, creativity, innovation and social psychology literatures to develop a conceptual model. It examines how four types of humor used by employees in their interactions with their immediate co-workers (in-group) and with external actors (external group) affect their innovative work behavior and innovative performance. In testing this model, data is collected by a cross-sectional survey conducted in the fall of 2015. Employees from nine Finnish organizations involved in the HURMOS Project were invited to participate. At the end of the survey period, eighty-eight participants (n=88) completed the questionnaire. The data is analyzed by conducting correlational test and hierarchical multiple regression using SPSS Statistics 22 software. The data analyses revealed some interesting findings. The results suggest that employees use of affiliative humor with the in-group and external group relate positively and significantly to innovative work behavior. Aggressive humor use has no significant relationship with innovative work behavior in the in-group context; but in the external group context, it has a negative significant association with innovative work behavior. The use of coping humor and reframing humor show no significant effect on innovative work behavior in both contexts. Also, affiliative humor, aggressive humor and coping humor show no significant direct relationship with innovative performance. On the contrary, reframing humor, surprisingly, relates positively to innovative performance in both contexts. Lastly, employees innovative work behavior relates positively to innovative performance. This study’s findings contribute to the existing knowledge by stressing the important role humor plays in individual innovativeness.

In this paper, the study will deal with the theoretical basis of internationalization of New Ventures and the importance of networks to acquire the knowledge to develop mobile application products on a global level. It will weigh the different uses of networks for market entry for SMEs that have a lack of capital, both human and financial. The study will also look at mobile applications themselves and the business models they currently have as options to create their new ventures. While many mobile app and technology companies look to globally release their mobile applications with the same approach without any change or localization, all consumers do not subscribe to the same buying tastes in every region. Taking into consideration buying patterns and regional differences, examination of the product positioning and applying this thought process to technology and how each company’s approach succeeded or failed. In this paper, the focus will be examining several views: The idea of a globally released mobile application by a company, developed with the thought that the idea is so universal that it will succeed in every market, or the concept that even in the mobile application development area, that each “product” will need to be customized for certain markets for a more successful market entry. Some other aspects of this paper will take a look at technology itself, both Mobile Applications and the Internet, as methods of market entry. With these technologies available to international new ventures, which do not have the financial capital to commit to internationalize.

The purpose of the respective study is to empirically address the influence of absorptive capacity and strategic partnerships on firm international performance. In particular, the objective is to find out whether those two dimensions, individually, have a relationship with the international performance of Finnish companies. Prior academic research shows that globalization and related competitive pressures have ensued in a situation in which companies actively evaluate new knowledge management processes and strategic partnering opportunities. Particularly, absorptive capacity and strategic partnerships have been identified as vital and major sources of firm competitive advantage for firms competing within the globalized business environment. However, it is not explicit that these concepts can continuously be turned into increased firm performance and, thus, are worth to examine in varied circumstances. Furthermore, these constructs have limited empirical research conducted in terms of their direct influence on firm performance. Accordingly, this study aims to fulfill this research gap and provide vital information for companies conducting their operations on international scale. This study is in the form of a quantitative research focusing on Finnish companies conducting international operations. The data were collected with a structured questionnaire utilizing the key informant technique in Finland in 2013 with a total of 98 respondent firms. SPSS software is used to run the statistical analysis of the study and to determine the relationships between the studied concepts. Consistent with prior research, the results of the study support the notion that there is a significant relationship between organizational absorptive capacity and firm international performance. Conversely, the results indicate that there is not a relationship found between strategic partnerships and firm international performance. In addition to these findings, the results show that strategic partnerships have a significant relationship with firm absorptive capacity suggesting that strategic partnerships may indirectly, through organizational absorptive capacity, influence firm international performance. The study and the given results provide several implications to companies and their managers concerning firm international operations. First and foremost, given the results of the study, there is a need for managerial action that builds and supports organizational absorptive capacity and strategic partnerships to enable increased firm international performance.

This thesis analyzed the environmental development of Chinese pure electric bus (PEB) industry. It indicated that the main problems which blocked the PEB promotion are the immaturity of battery technology and the lack of a suitable business model. According to current battery technology, the solution should be designing new business model for PEB then gradually enhance PEB function. This study analyzed the original Chinese PEB business model, which was based on the three different periods for the PEB commercialization roadmap. The main characteristic of Chinese PEB original business model is that the public transport company operates independently during the whole PEB life cycling, including PEB purchasing, operation, maintenance and disposal. Such structure would cause problems, such as: higher purchasing cost, the second purchasing for the power batteries, state subsidies do not form an effective incentive for comprehensive benefits, and PEB driving range cannot meet the actual capacity needs. Such problems are the main reasons to block Chinese PEB promotion. To solve the issue of the original Chinese PEB business model, a new business model is designed with the separation purchasing between vehicle and battery. The public transport companies should purchase only the vehicle without the battery included. As previously, the charging infrastructure would be constructed from the fund by the National Grid (Energy Company). Furthermore the National Grid would also lease the battery from the battery manufacturers with unified battery management. The public transport companies could then replace the battery according to the PEB operation needs and pay the energy company by battery usage and electrical energy cost. It is also recommended to have the original optimized program under the new business model structure, which includes subsidy program, financial program, and the whole vehicle purchasing mechanism. The new business model went through the pure electric bus (PEB) value network analysis and was assessed as reasonable with the value creation activity flow. The new business model suggests several proposals for the vehicle design, the PEB charging, PEB operation, PEB marketing, PEB service and PEB recycling aspects. All these proposals were implemented to the Tianjin bus line 638 in real market case. The comprehensive PEB benefits concern three aspects: economical, social and environmental. In addition, the enterprises from whole PEB industry value chain were evaluated for their own benefit effects. These evaluations constructed the whole PEB implementation appraisal system. The evaluation results showed that under new business model, the benefits for PEB in economic, social and environmental perspectives are higher than the ones under the original business model. The new business model would inject new vitality to the industry value networks, which could be operated effectively and also promote the interests of all stakeholders by benefited from the industry networks. A win-win situation can be achieved.

In recent years, the popularity and importance of mobile services increase rapidly thus increasing the demand towards spectrum resources. However, these resources are usually scarce and costly. Therefore, efficiently allocating the scarce resources is crucial. The Licensed Spectrum Access (LSA) approach has been introduced for efficient utilization of spectrum by using cognitive radio system (CRS) technology. One specific technique of LSA for mobile communications is Authorized Shared Access (ASA). In this thesis, the relevance of ASA for efficient spectrum utilization in mobile communications towards several ASA’s stakeholders of the spectrum resources (i.e., the regulatory bodies, the incumbent, the Mobile Network Operators (MNO)s and the society) are studied. Later, the methods of spectrum management, spectrum valuation and spectrum pricing are further explored. To analyze the value of the ASA spectrum, this thesis carried out a study to evaluate the viability of spectrum sharing by investigating the tragedy of anticommons and the tragedy of commons theories. Based on these theories, it is concluded that ASA spectrum sharing is capable of enhancing the spectral efficiency by avoiding the underutilization and overutilization (i.e., inefficient resource allocation) of the spectrum resources. Nevertheless, each group of ASA stakeholders has different interest on the spectrum, which complicates the valuation. To address this problem, the value of the spectrum is first categorized into three different groups; the regulatory value, the business value and the engineering value. After determining the influential factors on the value of the ASA spectrum for each category, multiple regression analysis of auctions in 12 EU countries between year 2009- 2013 is conducted to analyze the impact of each variable on the value of the ASA spectrum. The significance of influence and accuracy of each scenario is analyzed and derived through extensive evaluation of multiple scenarios. The results of the analysis are reflected in the thesis.

Foreign direct investment involves a business or production investment by a company to one or more countries. FDI enables host countries to achieve economic growth through investments that outweighs that of the host country’s local investment. It increases the capital formation of host countries, which in the long run lead to growth in both the private and public sectors. Host countries usually benefits from foreign direct investment because of new technologies, capital, employee training, and other incentives which investors bring with them. This paper tends to look at the relationship that exists between the host country and foreign direct investment. The biggest challenge investors’ encounter in developing countries like Nigeria is the lack of infrastructural facilities and this has reduced the amount of FDIs Nigeria. Various articles from different writers are used in this research work on how foreign direct investment affects the host country. At the end, it was discovered the foreign direct investment helps in developing the economy of developing countries like Nigeria.

This research is a qualitative case study analyzing probable business models for the future Internet of Things (IoT) enabled healthcare sector. To look at the future, this study utilizes the prominent futures research method, Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). This study combines business model and CLA to test the applicability of business model as a potential futures business research tool. In doing so, this study chose to understand the futures of a tech aided social context; the IoT enabled healthcare sector. This thesis offers extensive theoretical understanding on business models, Internet of Things, mHealth, eHealth, futures studies and Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). Grounded literature review has enabled the author to collect a high quality dataset. Based on five individual interviews with seasoned campaigners from the IoT/healthcare industry, author developed three linear futures scenario; they are: the ploughed field scenario (short-term future), the breaking dawn scenario (medium-term future) and the ant super-colony scenario (long-term future). Each of the scenario is created with a CLA framework presenting the four layers: litany, social causes, worldview and myth. Analyzing the scenarios author provides a detailed discussion on different business model elements for the IoT enabled healthcare sector in Finland. This discussion also presents several business opportunities for the futures market. Additionally, this study uncovers several social and global trends that are impacting the sector considerably. Success of this sector can foster significantly if policy makers consider these social and global issues in strategy development for the society. This research presents three different sets of business model elements for different time frames in the future. Additionally, author presents a simple conceptual framework for the business ecosystem for the IoT enabled healthcare sector in Finland. Important notion about this research, it is the first attempt to combine business models with a futures research methodology to speculate an industry’s future. All in all, with solid theoretical base, high quality & a smart quantity of empirical dataset, well-argued results and maintained ethical standards, this study offers a comprehensive description of the studied topic.