For decades, globalization has introduced both opportunities and pressures for companies around the world by introducing freer trade, increasing foreign direct investment and the international use of intellectual property that boosted the diffusion of knowledge and technology. As a result, the international competition has become more intense for many firms. Hence, putting a good or service into the market has never been as demanding as now and the demand to be early mover and have a low time-to-market is increasingly important for first be successful. This research will focus on determining whether a low time-to-market will contribute to a higher firm performance and what relation the time to market has with a firm’s business model framework and business model openness, preference for external funding and type of innovation. A theoretical framework was created based on relevant literature to be able to reach the objective of this thesis. The conceptual model was created from the literature which consisted of the hypotheses and variables that the study aimed to investigate. From the theoretical framework using a confirmatory approach, a survey was designed that was shared online to available network that the authors had. In summary, 43% of respondents had some sort of managing positions (upper management, manager and project management), 83% were mainly based in Sweden but also in Denmark, Germany, USA etc. and the work experience of the respondents was fairly distributed. Overall, 50% of the firms were between 0 to 30 years (1% did not respond) and more than 50% were considered to be a large firm depending if the classification was based on turnover with 51% as large firms (17% did not respond) or based on the number of employees with 58% as large firms. Data with 200 applicable responses (eight were removed i.e., 3.8%) was collected over four weeks of time. With the use of structural equation modeling and exploratory factor analysis, the collected data could be analyzed, and the hypotheses relevance could be answered. The final model was concluded to be adequate, as GOF indices and standardized factor loadings were on a sufficient level. As a result, the research showed that a fast time-to-market had a positive impact on firm performance measured in monetary measures (sales, profit, and market share) and that marketing innovation had a positive mediating effect on time to market and thus financial performance. The hypotheses regarding business model framework and capital structure correlating positive time to market were removed since the model was reworked. However, the study showed that technological innovation (product and process innovation) had a positive correlation to preference for external funding such as debt or issuance of equity. Since the construct validity of open business model and technological innovation was proved to be non-convergent, any deeper conclusion of this must be carefully reviewed. The results reinforced what other studies had shown, which is that open innovation or a more open business model contributes to both technological and marketing innovation. In summary, this demonstrated that a positive mediating effect existed for an open business model and marketing innovation which will speed up the time-to-market and hence increase the financial performance. Suggestion of future work could be to conduct similar studies in specific industry sectors to observe whether there is a difference in time-to-market depending on industry and what effect innovation and business model framework has.

A new type of communities is gaining momentum on the web and is reshaping online communication and collaboration patterns and the way how information is consumed and produced [Gros04, Kolb06]. Examples of such communities are Wikipedia, MySpace, OpenBC, YouTube, Folksonomies, numerous Weblogs and others. In literature different terms can be found to denote the emerging and growing new phenomenon: social software [Bäch06] or peer production [Scho05]. In the year 2005, Tim O'Reilly popularized the term Web 2.0 [O'Reil05]. While the first two terms can be applied also to earlier, already established forms of online communities (for an overview see [Stan02]), the term Web 2.0 is mostly applied to emphasize the differences of emerging communities compared to earlier forms of online communities, encompassing various perspectives - technology, attitude, philosophy. (...)

A new type of communities is gaining momentum on the web and is reshaping online communication and collaboration patterns and the way how information is consumed and produced [Gros04, Kolb06]. Examples of such communities are Wikipedia, MySpace, OpenBC, YouTube, Folksonomies, numerous Weblogs and others. In literature different terms can be found to denote the emerging and growing new phenomenon: social software [Bäch06] or peer production [Scho05]. In the year 2005, Tim O'Reilly popularized the term Web 2.0 [O'Reil05]. While the first two terms can be applied also to earlier, already established forms of online communities (for an overview see [Stan02]), the term Web 2.0 is mostly applied to emphasize the differences of emerging communities compared to earlier forms of online communities, encompassing various perspectives - technology, attitude, philosophy. (...)

Today’s value chains rely strongly on a virgin material to ‘take-make-dispose’ products.One way to reduce that dependency on finite resources is a circular economy (CE).Different pillars form the concept, this research paper focuses on Product-ServiceSystems (PSS) in which a customer instead of buying a product for example only paysfor the use of one.Companies who want to transfer towards a circular business model (BM) facetremendous organisational challenges. They cannot just modify some parts of theiroperations, they have to change the entire BM. Much of the literature and t on BM is aresult of e-business and therefore not necessarily suitable for circular BM.To investigate if the current tools are suitable, the aim of the research is to answer thequestion: Do existing BM Frameworks cover the information requirements for PSS BMswithin the CE.The paper provides a literature review on two bodies of knowledge. First it explains thecharacteristics of PSSs in the context of a CE; secondly, it describes the different BMframeworks which are assessed in this research.To answer the research question, three sub-questions are formed on values, activitiesand stakeholders of a BM to be applied on the BM frameworks. The research follows atwo-step approach to answer these sub-questions, in a first step 9 experts fromacademia, consultancy and business were interviewed on characteristics of PSSs.Based on these characteristics, 26 questions were defined to assess the strength andlimitations of the 9 BM frameworks.As the analysis of this assessment shows, future work is necessary to develop suitableBM frameworks for PSSs and scaled up to the entire CE. The research does notpropose a new BM framework but rather points on lacks in current ones and suggestspossible further research to locate these lacks. Further, the two-step approach as aresearch methodology can be used to connect and assess any kind of expertknowledgewith existing literature or frameworks.