The steel industry is in a critical situation where the industry contributes to global warming through its emissions, resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. There are higher demands from various stakeholders and laws and regulations are becoming increasingly strict. The steel industry has been forced to change its processes and production in whole or in part to meet these demands. The production of steel must become more sustainable and therefore innovative solutions are required to promote sustainable steel production. The purpose of this study is to investigate how possible requirements for sustainability have affected the innovative work in the Swedish steel industry. The survey is based on the work of two Swedish steel companies. These are being compared regarding innovation and sustainability strategies to see if there are similarities and/or differences in their work. The purpose of the study is fulfilled through literature studies and interviews with two case companies in the Swedish steel industry. The collected empirical data in the study shows that both companies work actively with their innovation and sustainability work. Both companies have a vision to reduce their use of fossil sources and instead move towards a more fossil-free steel production. The case companies also have a strong focus on circularity and the use of scrap. What differentiates the two companies is their production techniques where they have applied different innovation strategies. Even their sustainability requirements differ in some ways due to the size of the company. Research on the connection between stakeholders' sustainability requirements and the innovation work in the Swedish steel industry was something that was missing. The study has therefore identified the research gap and tried to contribute information to this area. The study has contributed information about which stakeholders' sustainability requirements promote innovative solutions with the aim of reducing the steel industry's emissions. Further research can study whether the stakeholders can set higher demands and see what change this would have led to.

In this thesis, we study the degree of the canonical map of surfaces of general type. In particular, we give the first examples known in the literature of surfaces having degree d=10,11, 13, 14, 15, and 18 of the canonical map. They are presented in a self-contained and independent way from the rest of the thesis. We show also how we have discovered them. These surfaces are product-quotient surfaces. In this thesis, we study the theory of product-quotient surfaces giving also some new results and improvements. As a consequence of this, we have written and run a MAGMA script to produce a list of families of product-quotient surfaces having geometric genus three and a self-intersection of the canonical divisor large. After that, we study the canonical map of product-quotient surfaces and we apply the obtained results to the list of product-quotient surfaces just mentioned. In this way, we have discovered the examples of surfaces having degree d=10,11,14, and 18 of the canonical map. The remaining ones with degrees 13 and 15 do not satisfy the assumptions to compute the degree of the canonical map directly. Hence we have had to compute the canonical degree of these two families of product-quotient surfaces in a very explicit way through the equations of the pair of curves defining them. Another work of this thesis is the classification of all smooth surfaces of general type with geometric genus three which admits an action of a group G isomorphic to \mathbb Z_2^k and such that the quotient is a projective plane. This classification is attained through the theory of abelian covers. We obtained in total eleven families of surfaces. We compute the canonical map of all of them, finding in particular a family of surfaces with a canonical map of degree 16 not in the literature. We discuss the quotients by all subgroups of G finding several K3 surfaces with symplectic involutions. In particular, we show that six families are families of triple K3 burgers in the sense of Laterveer. Finally, in another work we study also the possible accumulation points for the slopes K^2/ \chi of unbounded sequences of minimal surfaces of general type having a degree d of the canonical map. As a new result, we construct unbounded families of minimal (product-quotient) surfaces of general type whose degree of the canonical map is 4 and such that the limits of the slopes K^2/ \chi assume countably many different values in the closed interval [6+2/3, 8].

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