The first phase of new product development (NPD) is today commonly referred to as the Front End (FE) of NPD. The phase has received a decent amount of attention during the recent years, nevertheless insufficient considering its ability to influence a project’s outcome. The phase begins when an idea is born, and ends when a formal meeting decides whether to invest in the idea or not. The investment then leads the project to enter a formal phase. During the FE, a large number of issues occur, which are believed to be the result of deficient processing of information. If the issues are not managed correctly, the NPD procedure will not be efficient. When information is being processed into knowledge, sometimes an uncertain, equivocal, or complex situation arises, which leads to delays, additional costs, and wasted efforts. These information processing problems (IPPs) need to be managed by firms in order to reduce their negative repercussions. Depending on a firm’s perception of the novelty towards a product, the project is considered to be either radical or incremental. Depending on that novelty, it is theorized that the IPPs will have different dispersions, and pose differently significant challenges to the project. The aim of this study is therefore to investigate the differences of the significance and dispersion of the IPPs, during the FE, when comparing radical and incremental NPD projects. For this purpose, a case study approach was deemed appropriate. In order to collect data concerning the IPPs, seven case studies were conducted. The data was collected through semi-structured interviews, with respondents that possess' an extensive experience from working with NPD within Swedish firms. The data analysis from the seven interviews proved that indeed there is a difference in how the IPPs vary, dependent on whether the project is of a radical or incremental nature. All the IPPs showed higher levels of significance in the FE in radical projects, than in incremental ones. Uncertainty proved to be the IPP that differed the most and therefore possessed the greatest significance difference. This means that differentiated approaches in radical respective incremental projects are needed in order to reduce uncertainty. Equivocality represented the IPP with the least difference in significance, meaning that the FE in radical and incremental projects require rather similar design in how to prevent equivocal problems. By understanding the differences in dispersion and significance, one can create differentiated management approaches during the FE, that fit the level of novelty of the product at hand. For some products, preventive actions must be taken to a larger degree compared to others. By doing so, the lead time of the FE can be shortened as less problems will arise, creating a faster and smoother process. The resources saved could be spent on improving activities, instead of being wasted on repairing unnecessary problems. The study contributes to the research field of NPD by adding newknowledge, aiding the collective effort of increasing firm’s proficiency in how to manage the FE.

Syfte: Syftet med studien är att identifiera en institutionaliserad diskurs kring kommunikation av hållbarhet inom klädbranschen. Utgångspunkten för identifiering av en sådan diskurs är företagens tillämpning av redovisningsmodellen triple bottom line. Vidare förklaras denna diskurs med hjälp av legitimitets- och intressentteorin. Resultatet av studien syftar till att bidra till kunskapsbildningen kring dessa teorier.Metod: En kvalitativ diskursanalys har genomförts på fyra utvalda företags hållbarhetsredovisningar inom klädbranschen. Företagen representerar två olika profiler, fast fashion samt high-end. Studien är inspirerad av innehållsanalys då datamaterialet har kategoriserats. Kategorierna har dock fått växa fram under analysens gång för att på så vis identifiera diskursen kring kommunikation av hållbarhet.Resultat: Studien tyder på att hållbarhetsredovisning har institutionaliserats och att det finns en relativt tydlig diskurs kring kommunikation av hållbarhet inom den studerade branschen. Den tydligaste variationen som framkommit är en skillnad mellan företagens profiler, nämligen att företagen inom high-end trycker mer på kvalitet på kläderna än vad företagen inom fast fashion gör.Originalitet/värde: Tidigare studier har funnit att det finns stora skillnader i hur corporate social responsibility rapporteras mellan olika branscher. Denna studie undersöker hur företag inom samma bransch, men med olika profilering, rapporterar om hållbarhet. Studien har bidragit till att öka förståelsen för varför företag inom klädbranschen väljer att lyfta viss information i sina hållbarhetsredovisningar. / Purpose: This paper seeks to identify an institutionalised discourse about communication of sustainability in the clothing industry. The base for identification of this discourse is how a company applies the triple bottom line model. Further, this discourse is explained with legitimacy- and stakeholder theory. The result of the study aims to contribute to increase knowledge about these theories.Methodology: A qualitative discourse analyses has been employed on the sustainability reports of four fashion companies. The companies represents two profiles, fast fashion and high-end. The study is partly conducted by applying content analysis on a data driven basis. Categories have emerged during the course of the analysing work.Findings: The result suggests that the sustainability reporting has been institutionalised and that there exist a relatively clear discourse about communication of sustainability within the studied industry. The most obvious variation that has emerged is a variety between the companies' profiles, the high-end companies communicate quality of the clothes to a greater extent compared to the fast fashion companies.Originality/value: Previous studies have shown that there are big differences in how corporate social responsibility is reported among industries. This study examines how companies in the same industry, with various corporate profiles, report on sustainability. The study has helped to increase the understanding of why a company in the clothing industry chooses to highlight certain information in their sustainability report.This thesis is written in Swedish.

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

No description available.

In critical real-time systems, any faulty behavior may endanger lives. Hence, system verification and validation is essential before their deployment. In fact, safety authorities ask to ensure deterministic guarantees. In this thesis, we are interested in offering temporal guarantees; in particular we need to prove that the end-to-end response time of every flow present in the network is bounded. This subject has been addressed for many years and several approaches have been developed. After a brief comparison between the existing approaches, the Trajectory Approach sounded like a good candidate due to the tightness of its offered bound. This method uses results established by the scheduling theory to derive an upper bound. The reasons leading to a pessimistic upper bound are investigated. Moreover, since the method must be applied on large networks, it is important to be able to give results in an acceptable time frame. Hence, a study of the method's scalability was carried out. Analysis shows that the complexity of the computation is due to a recursive and iterative processes. As the number of flows and switches increase, the total runtime required to compute the upper bound of every flow present in the network understudy grows rapidly. While based on the concept of the Trajectory Approach, we propose to compute an upper bound in a reduced time frame and without significant loss in its precision. It is called the Scalable Trajectory Approach. After applying it to a network, simulation results show that the total runtime was reduced from several days to a dozen seconds.

The rapid growth of the Internet and the proliferation of its new applications pose a serious challenge in network performance management and monitoring. The current Internet has no mechanism for providing feedback on network congestion to the end-systems at the IP layer. For applications and their end hosts, end-to-end measurements may be the only way of measuring network performance. Understanding the packet delay and loss behavior of the Internet is important for proper design of network algorithms such as routing and flow control algorithms, for the dimensioning of buffers and link capacity, and for choosing parameters in simulation and analytic studies. In this thesis, round trip time (RTT), one-way network delay and packet loss in the Internet are measured at different times of the day, using a Voice over IP (VoIP) device. The effect of clock skew on one-way network delay measurements is eliminated by a Linear Programming algorithm, implemented in MATLAB. Distributions of one-way network delay and RTT in the Internet are determined. It is observed that delay distribution has a gamma-like shape with heavy tail. It is tried to model delay distribution with gamma, lognormal and Weibull distributions. It is observed that most of the packet losses in the Internet are single packet losses. The effect of firewall on delay measurements is also observed.

L'évolution de la technologie VLSI permet aux systèmes sur puce (SoCs) d'intégrer de nombreuses fonctions hétérogènes dans une seule puce et demande, en raison de contraintes économiques, une unique mémoire externe partagée (SDRAM). Par conséquent, la conception du système de mémoire principale, et plus particulièrement l'architecture du contrôleur de mémoire, est devenu un facteur très important dans la détermination de la performance globale du système. Le choix d'un contrôleur de mémoire qui répond aux besoins de l'ensemble du système est une question complexe. Cela nécessite l'exploration de l'architecture du contrôleur de mémoire, puis la validation de chaque configuration par simulation. Bien que l'exploration de l'architecture du contrôleur de mémoire soit un facteur clé pour une conception réussite d'un système, l'état de l'art sur les contrôleurs de mémoire ne présente pas des architectures aussi flexibles que nécessaire pour cette tâche. Même si certaines d'entre elles sont configurables, l'exploration est restreinte à des ensembles limités de paramètres tels que la profondeur des tampons, la taille du bus de données, le niveau de la qualité de service et la distribution de la bande passante. Plusieurs classes de trafic coexistent dans les applications réelles, comme le trafic de service au mieux et le trafic de service garanti qui accèdent à la mémoire partagée d'une manière concurrente. En conséquence, la considération de l'interaction entre le système de mémoire et la structure d'interconnexion est devenue vitale dans les SoCs actuels. Beaucoup de réseaux sur puce (NoCs) fournissent des services aux classes de trafic pour répondre aux exigences des applications. Cependant, très peu d'études considèrent l'accès à la SDRAM avec une approche système, et prennent en compte la spécificité de l'accès à la SDRAM dans les systèmes sur puce à base de réseaux intégrés. Cette thèse aborde le sujet de l'accès à la mémoire dynamique SDRAM dans les systèmes sur puce à base de réseaux intégrés. Nous introduisons une architecture de contrôleur de mémoire totalement configurable basée sur des blocs fonctionnels configurables, et proposons un modèle de simulation associé relativement précis temporellement et à haut niveau d'abstraction. Ceci permet l'exploration du sous-système de mémoire grâce à la facilité de configuration de l'architecture du contrôleur de mémoire. En raison de la discontinuité de services entre le réseau sur puce et le contrôleur de mémoire, nous proposons également dans le cadre de cette thèse un protocole de contrôle de flux de bout en bout pour accéder à la mémoire à travers un contrôleur de mémoire multiports. L'idée, simple sur le principe mais novatrice car jamais proposée à notre connaissance, se base sur l'exploitation des informations sur l'état du contrôleur de mémoire dans le réseau intégré. Les résultats expérimentaux montrent qu'en contrôlant l'injection du trafic de service au mieux dans le réseau intégré, notre protocole augmente les performances du trafic de service garanti en termes de bande passante et de latence, tout en préservant la bande passante moyenne du trafic de service au mieux. / The ongoing advancements in VLSI technology allow System-on-Chip (SoC) to integrate many heterogeneous functions into a single chip, but still demand, because of economical constraints, a single and shared main off-chip SDRAM. Consequently, main memory system design, and more specifically the architecture of the memory controller, has become an increasingly important factor in determining the overall system performance. Choosing a memory controller design that meets the needs of the whole system is a complex issue. This requires the exploration of the memory controller architecture, and then the validation of each configuration by simulation. Although the architecture exploration of the memory controller is a key to successful system design, state of the art memory controllers are not as flexible as necessary for this task. Even if some of them present a configurable architecture, the exploration is restricted to limited sets of parameters such as queue depth, data bus size, quality-of-service level, and bandwidth distribution. Several classes of traffic co-exist in real applications, e.g. best effort traffic and guaranteed service traffic, and access the main memory. Therefore, considering the interaction between the memory subsystem and the interconnection system has become vital in today's SoCs. Many on chip networks provide guaranteed services to traffic classes to satisfy the applications requirements. However, very few studies consider the SDRAM access within a system approach, and take into account the specificity of the SDRAM access as a target in NoC-based SoCs. This thesis addresses the topic of dynamic access to SDRAM in NoC-based SoCs. We introduce a totally customizable memory controller architecture based on fully configurable building components and design a high level cycle approximate model for it. This enables the exploration of the memory subsystem thanks to the ease of configuration of the memory controller architecture. Because of the discontinuity of services between the network and the memory controller, we also propose within the framework of this thesis an Extreme End to End flow control protocol to access the memory device through a multi-port memory controller. The simple yet novel idea is to exploit information about the memory controller status in the NoC. Experimental results show that by controlling the best effort traffic injection in the NoC, our protocol increases the performance of the guaranteed service traffic in terms of bandwidth and latency, while maintaining the average bandwidth of the best effort traffic.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:50:25Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 6457.pdf: 3485036 bytes, checksum: 29d5a25444712bfd366a4807cf19ff2c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-12-12 / Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos / Pre- development phase and corresponds to the activities ranging from identifying opportunities to generate product concepts. Throughout these activities there is a dynamic and complex flow of information about business strategies, requirements and market trends, technological alternatives and resource allocation. At this stage important decisions are made, and if misleading may result in failures in the performance of the new product. The subject has gained importance in recent years, however, there is still not an understanding on how to coordinate the activities of the predevelopment or which results are expected in this phase, therefore being a gap in the literature. This thesis aims to identify and analyze the practices, technical and tools what are adopted in front-end development in a sample of manufacturing firms. Through systematic literature review identified ten reference models for the front end development. These were published between 1988 and 2013 and seek to systematize the activities of pre-development and guide managers in conducting phase, proposing technical and management support tools. 57 different techniques have been identified. Through multiple case studies it was observed that all studied companies adopt referential models for conducting the activities of front end development. As in literature these models followed by companies differ mainly in relation to the number of stages or activities, but adopt some techniques and tools as well diffused in the literature. We observe that the most common practices in all companies can be grouped into early, middle and end activities, which divide the front end development in three distinct phases. For every moment of the predevelopment can be selected a set of techniques and support tools. These techniques and tools do not necessarily have to be adopted together because they have different natures, but are a "package" of suggestions to be considered. In addition, internal and external factors in the companies affect such practices. It was also possible to identify, in the companies analyzed, finding it difficult to measure the performance of the activities of the pre-development phase itself, and the PDP as a whole, so some possible performance indicators for this phase were suggested. Another difficulty associated with the use of these techniques and tools is that they require financial and time resources, and all require the skills of those who lead. Therefore, the most modern and best potential for achieving results technique can be ineffective if conducted by people who do not have necessary skills and appropriate technical support. / O pré-desenvolvimento corresponde a fase e as atividades que vão da identificação de oportunidades à geração de conceitos de produtos. Ao longo destas atividades existe um fluxo dinâmico e complexo de informações sobre estratégias de negócios, requisitos e tendências do mercado, alternativas tecnológicas e alocação de recursos. Nesta fase importantes decisões são tomadas, e se equivocadas podem resultar em falhas no desempenho do novo produto. O tema ganhou importância nos últimos anos, no entanto, ainda não existe um entendimento sobre como coordenar as atividades do pré-desenvolvimento ou sobre quais resultados se esperarem desta fase, sendo, portanto uma lacuna na literatura. Esta Tese objetiva identificar e analisar as práticas, técnicas e ferramentas de pré-desenvolvimento adotadas em uma amostra de empresas industriais. Através de revisão bibliográfica sistematizada foram identificados dez modelos referenciais para o pré-desenvolvimento. Estes foram publicados entre 1988 e 2013 e buscam sistematizar as atividades do pré-desenvolvimento e orientar os gestores na condução da fase, propondo técnicas e ferramentas de apoio ao gerenciamento. Foram identificadas 57 diferentes técnicas. Por meio de estudo de múltiplos casos observou-se que todas as empresas estudadas adotam modelos referenciais para condução das atividades do pré-desenvolvimento. Assim como na literatura, estes modelos adotados pelas empresas diferenciam-se, principalmente, em relação ao número de fases ou atividades, mas adotam algumas técnicas e ferramentas bem difundidas pela literatura. Observa-se, deste modo, que as práticas mais comuns em todas as empresas podem ser agrupadas em atividades iniciais, intermediárias e finais, que dividem o prédesenvolvimento em três momentos distintos. Para cada momento do pré-desenvolvimento podem ser selecionadas técnicas e ferramentas de apoio. Estas técnicas e ferramentas não necessariamente devem ser adotadas em conjunto, pois possuem naturezas distintas, mas são um pacote de sugestões a ser considerado. Além disso, fatores internos e externos às empresas condicionam tais práticas. Também foi possível identificar que existem dificuldades por parte das empresas analisadas em medirem o desempenho das atividades do pré-desenvolvimento na própria fase e no PDP como um todo. Por isso foram sugeridos alguns possíveis indicadores para essa fase. Outra dificuldade associada ao uso destas técnicas e ferramentas é que muitas demandam recursos financeiros e tempo; e todas demandam habilidades de quem as conduz. Portanto, a técnica mais moderna e com melhor potencial para alcance de resultados pode ser ineficaz se conduzida por pessoas que não tenham habilidades necessárias e apoio técnico adequado.

Submitted by Gabriel Arantes Galvão Dias dos Santos (arantes_gabriel@hotmail.com) on 2018-05-14T15:21:05Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação pós defesa.pdf: 3303163 bytes, checksum: 01b3ceab15b6016a9aaca279d39ebdc5 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Sulamita Selma C Colnago null (sulamita@btu.unesp.br) on 2018-05-14T17:46:54Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 santos_gagd_me_bot.pdf: 3303163 bytes, checksum: 01b3ceab15b6016a9aaca279d39ebdc5 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-05-14T17:46:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 santos_gagd_me_bot.pdf: 3303163 bytes, checksum: 01b3ceab15b6016a9aaca279d39ebdc5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-04-27 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Entre as espécies do gênero Leishmania estão os protozoários que causam leishmaniose, uma doença tropical negligenciada endêmica em muitos países, incluindo o Brasil. Métodos de controle e tratamento ainda são ineficientes e a resistência a drogas é um desafio. Por isso, pesquisas para entender melhor a biologia molecular desses parasitos são encorajadas. Uma possível estratégia para isso, é o estudo dos telômeros, estrutura fundamental para a homeostase do genoma. Os telômeros são estruturalmente diferentes do resto do cromossomo, e contam com proteínas específicas que realizam sua manutenção. A Replication Protein A subunit 1 (RPA-1) é uma proteína que interage de DNA de simples fita que tem diversas funções relacionadas com o metabolismo do DNA eucarioto, incluindo os telômeros. A RPA-1 é parte de um complexo heterotrimérico conservado nos eucariotos, incluindo Leishmania spp.. Recentemente nós mostramos por modelagem molecular que a estrutura terciária da LaRPA-1 difere dos seus ortólogos em humanos e leveduras, além de mostrar interações específicas nos telômeros dos parasitos, que na ausência de homólogos canônicos para telomere-end binding protein (TEP) elegem a LaRPA-1 como um potencial candidato para essa função. Neste trabalho, avaliamos a capacidade da LaRPA-1 como uma TEP, cujo papel principal é proteger a extremidade 3' dos telômeros de ataques por exonucleases. Uma busca estrutural por proteínas que compartilham com as TEP domínios de interação proteína-DNA, mostrou que no genoma de Leishmania spp. não existem homólogos estruturais para as mesmas. Aqui mostramos por diferentes abordagens que a LaRPA-1 tem a capacidade de interagir com no mínimo uma repetição telomérica e também é capaz de proteger in vitro a simples fita telomérica rica em G (5’ TTAGGG 3’) da digestão por Exonuclease I bacteriana cuja atividade é no sentido 3’-5’. Somando esses dados, com dados anteriores que mostram que a LaRPA-1 tem preferência pela fita telomérica rica em G e o fato dela ter sido co-purificada com a atividade de telomerase sugerem fortemente que ela está diretamente relacionada com a manutenção da maquinaria telomérica, podendo inclusive ser considerada a principal ligante de simples fita telomérica rica em G (3’ G-overhang) em Leishmania spp. / Among the protozoa parasites of the Leishmania genus are the causative agents of leishmaniasis, a neglected tropical disease endemic in many countries, including Brazil. Disease control and treatment are still inefficient and parasite drug resistance is a challenge. Therefore, efforts for the establishment of intensive research to better understand the molecular biology of these parasites are encouraged. One possible strategy is to study parasite telomeres, a vital chromosome structure important to maintain genome homeostasis. Telomeres are significantly different from the rest of the chromosome and are associated with proteins involved in their maintenance. Replication Protein A subunit 1 (RPA1), a single-stranded DNA-binding protein that plays multiple roles in eukaryotic DNA metabolism, including telomeres, is part of a conserved heterotrimeric complex which is present in most eukaryotes including Leishmania spp. Recently, using molecular dynamics simulations we have shown that the tertiary structure of LaRPA-1 differs from human and yeast RPA-1 and that it also shows parasitespecific interactions with telomeric DNA. In the absence of real homologues to telomere-end binding proteins, LaRPA-1 could be considered a potential candidate. If LaRPA-1 is a telomere-end binding protein, one of its main role would be to protect the telomeric 3`-end termini from nuclease attack. A structural search for proteins that share with the TEP domains of protein-DNA interaction, showed that in the genome of Leishmania spp. there are no structural homologues for them. In this work, we show by different methods, that in vitro LaRPA-1 can bind at least one telomeric repeat and it can also protect the telomeric G-rich sequence (5’ TTAGGG 3’) from the bacterial 3’-5’Exonuclease I digestion. These data compiled to previous data showing that LaRPA-1 preferentially binds the G-rich telomeric DNA and that it co-purifies with telomerase activity strongly suggest that LaRPA-1 is directly involved with parasite telomere maintenance and, possibly, is the main G-rich single-stranded (3’ G-overhang) telomere-binding protein in Leishmania spp.

New product development (NPD), represent a valuable source for companies’ futuresustainability and development. Previous literature underline the importance of managing theearly period of NPD, since this can increase the performance and consequently reduce theproducts time to market. Organizational politics is present during the whole innovation process,but especially in the front end where there is uncertainty or dissent about choices. For thisreason, contributing a developed understanding of organizational politics within the front end ofinnovation (FEI), is the aim of this study.The theoretical framework of this study combines prior theories that relate to the organizationalpolitics. The structure of it is based on two elements referring to the individual- and theorganizational elements. Organizational elements can further be particularised to structural- andstrategical elements.A qualitative study and a research design with six interviews, where conducted in six innovativefirms of all size. This choice of methodology reflects the explorative purpose of this research.The empirical data are only primary data, collected during the interviews with Research andDevelopment (R&D) managers and R&D subordinates.The analysis of empirical findings revealed relevant conclusions, which can bring value to theresearch area, and also to the practice. Our findings show that diverse sources of organizationalpolitics can be identified in the front end of innovation. Organizational politics both on theindividual and organizational level are identified. Further its we find that informal and formalpower is distributed both in the organizational level and the individual level.The study’s practical relevance consists in the advices and implications to decision makers ofinnovative companies and managers within R&D. By identifying and increasing knowledge inthe field of organizational politics in the front end of innovation, organizations can make frontend activities more efficient and therefore obtain competitive advantages. The theoreticalimplications reflect the organizational politics in the area of the FEI.