Agile based development seems to become a favorable model for offshore development. It allows both on and offshore team to work in small iterations minimizing the effect of change in software requirements and at the same time developing regular communication between them. However different factors such as physical distance and lack of communication between on and offshore team becomes a hurdle between them leading to misunderstandings about software requirements. This research work gives an insight about these challenges from the software industry by presenting and discussing the responses of four software companies located in different countries, collected through an online questionnaire. The authors found that lack of communication between on and offshore site is seen as a major challenge for better understanding of software requirements. Shorter iterations at the offshore site require more communication with the onshore site. The language problem seems to exist only when both on and offshore site who are non-English speakers communicate in English. Regular long distance meetings would help in better understanding of software requirements. Previous domain and product knowledge is helpful in better understanding of software requirements. This research work would allow different stakeholders within agile based on/offshore setting to better understand these challenges and deal accordingly with them.

AB Electrolux is a company that focuses on innovative products and collaborationamongst others. Today, they are using their intranet “E-gate” to enhance collaboration.AB Electrolux has recently introduced new Web 2.0 social media technology on E-gate.In contemporary business, it seems like social media and innovations are hot topics; butit is not easy, to implement social media, create innovations, and also make use of it inan organisation. In a majority of organisations are these matters often overrepresented.In organisation different policies, rules, guidelines and employees are involved duringchanges, and this is aiding organisations to establish how social media features canenhance and promote innovation.Nowadays, innovation is significant to organisations, especially when it comes togain advantages toward competitors or when trying to advance in the marketplace. Inthis thesis the collected information is objectively applied. This, in order to gainqualitative knowledge about subjects of interest such as; cultural issues, knowledgemanagement and the socio-technical perspective – because these areas could beconsidered to have a huge effect and impact on innovation. Further it could have aneffect on how innovation emerges in organisations. This is of importance especially inareas such as knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer.The results are showing: Organisational culture and knowledge management plays acrucial and important part of innovation. These areas must be considered iforganisations are implementing or using new technology. It is also to be recommendedwhen organisations are trying to enhance the pace of innovations. In this thesis I havealso constructed a model that illustrates how an organisation could create an innovativeatmosphere, along with a socio-technical perspective.

In today’s turbulent business circumstance, organizations’ ability to sustain their growth and competitive advantage depends on how well they manage their capital of knowledge. Recognizing that knowledge is a key factor to the success of the company, companies are evolving practices to facilitate the creation, acquisition, storage, utilization, especially the sharing of knowledge assets.   The theoretical problem of this paper is that the change of organizational model, which is more flexible, team-oriented and more reliant on knowledge assets, has influenced nowadays organizations deeply. Another development is the discovery of the importance of the organizational informal structure, which coexists with the organizational formal structure. Employees within organizations interact with each other not only in a myriad of ways, but also in a way of social relationships. However, with this shift of today’s organizations to more-organic, network-like structures, there is a great need to understand how knowledge is shared within these structures and how to manage it.   The aim of this paper concludes with the insights of how employees’ network positions are related to knowledge sharing within the organization, and how the organization could better leverage individual in these critical positions, so to ensure that knowledge in organization shared with unobstructed communication, cooperation, and reduce the costs of bridging inside the organization.   This study is a case study conducted in a Swedish company with a qualitative research strategy based on the structural holes theory, and 12 employees were interviewed. The empirical findings are that we found senior manager becomes peripheral, fear of losing power makes knowledge sharing baffling, and the hub position in network is a double-edged sword, which means that the employees’ network positions may bring competitive advantages for the employees or the whole organization, but sometimes it may press employees in a hub position too much.

Social networking services are relatively new phenomena and they have attracted so much attention around themselves. These services have been seen by many organizations as a po-tential tool to facilitate knowledge sharing. However, very few have successfully adopted such services. Many problems which lead to failures arise when it comes to developing and implementing social networking services with the goal to facilitate knowledge sharing.The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the failure of one social networking service to satisfy the knowledge sharing needs of the organization that has developed and implement-ed it in-house.Interviews with three employees of the company were arranged. The interviews were done with time intervals in between. This gave us the opportunity to rearrange the questions that were going to be asked to the next interviewee. The interviews were really helpful and gave us a good insight of the problem with the development and implementation of the social networking service that the organization was facing. After the interviews were conducted, a questionnaire was elaborated and sent out to the employees in the organization.The results we came up with were really interesting. A table with failure factors for the so-cial networking service used in the organization was made and a model suggesting the steps an organization should follow for the successful development and implementation of a so-cial networking service that facilitates knowledge sharing internally was developed.We found out that the failure was not in the social networking service itself but in the way it was presented, positioned and communicated to the employees of the company. They never took the service seriously for its intended purpose which was knowledge sharing within the organization and that led to the cancelation of the project.

In a rapidly growing global economy businesses must effectively manage their assets to remain competitive and promote company growth. Many companies are only now beginning to realize that employee knowledge is a valuable asset to their business and also needs to be managed. Organizations are exploring different ways to improve the sharing of knowledge within a business and how to keep employee’s with key knowledge within the business. This study investigates social media and the impact of business hierarchy on knowledge sharing within an organization. The use of social media, in our particular case, wikis, within an organization is investigated as part of the broader term Enterprise 2.0. This study is based on the theoretical understanding of wikis as tools that enable internalization, externalization and objectification of knowledge. This study investigates what may be the contributing factors that affect an employee’s use of a centralized wiki for knowledge sharing. This study focuses on the employees of a British software development and training company, SoftX, and used a mixed method research strategy based on the use of online surveys and face-to-face interviews. We used an online tool, SurveyMonkey, to register and correlate responses to our survey. In total, 99 responses were received and semi-structured, face-to-face interviews were conducted with five employees.   Correlations were used in establishing foundation for the analysis of the variables. Finally, the causality between the assumed factors affecting the use of the SoftX wiki is tested using multiple linear regression analysis. Several important factors presented themselves as a result of our study at SoftX which could explain the apparent lack of use of their wiki as a means of knowledge sharing within the business. The analysis demonstrates that the use of the SoftX's wiki by employees was influenced by organizational, personal and technological factors.

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Globalization was the turning point when many large corporations started to begin their operations in foreign countries which provided them with new markets to sell their products as well as new manufacturing facilities. While this trend of internationalization was not new but what was interesting was the speed at which this happened with globalization. The large enterprises were the first to internationalize but later this trend was growing where SME’s have also diversified their operations in foreign countries because of new opportunities available, low cost of labor, and limited growth opportunities in their home countries (Vachini, 2005). While this expansion opens new doors, there are lot of challenges that could firm could face in the host country (Vachani, 1998).  The world economy at present is moving rapidly towards a knowledge-based economy. According to OECD (1996) the term knowledge based economy is the total recognition of the role of knowledge and technology in economic growth. Knowledge is being widely accepted as the most important resource which is an intangible resource, hard to imitate and these makes it a source of competitive advantage for organizations. But, merely recognizing the importance of knowledge is not sufficient to have competitive advantage, Organizations must understand how to best manage this precious resource and it requires great effort in terms of how to create, share and utilize knowledge. If this knowledge is not managed properly it could affect growth, operational efficiency and innovation capacity (De Long & Davenport, 2003). / N/A

For several years, knowledge has been treated as a key successful resource in business and management. As knowledge management has been researched in various research domains, academics in project management have been also interested in the potential role of knowledge management. The aim of the research is to explore the usefulness and potentiality of knowledge management as well as to confirm the influencing elements of knowledge sharing within project-based organisations. This research implemented a qualitative research method which prompted an in-depth understanding of individual members’ perceptions towards knowledge sharing in project teams. In order to fulfil the methodological objective, the data were collected by using semi-structured interviews with 26 project managers from five project-based firms. The grounded theory method was adopted as the data analysis technique of this study. It allowed the researcher to explore and analyse the individuals’ perceptions of knowledge sharing and knowledge management. As a result, this study suggests four potential influencing factors of knowledge sharing, which are trust, relationship, motivation, and self-efficacy. The research data show that trust plays a role as a basic currency between members to share knowledge. Positive and affirmative relationships with other members will make it easy to share more knowledge and lead to better quality of knowledge. In this research, the informants also imply that members would be motivated to engage in knowledge sharing in respect to workload, culture, and remuneration. Lastly, one’s belief that one can achieve certain things -self-efficacy- is also important to create improved knowledge sharing between members in project teams. The research found that the majority of the companies managed their knowledge and carried out knowledge sharing activities. However, most of them did not recognise that their behaviours were relevant to knowledge management. In this research, the author suggests that confirming precedent knowledge management and knowledge sharing activities should occur prior to adopting new approaches. Furthermore, this research explores the potential influencing factors that play a role as either enablers or barriers. Thus, project managers and management should be cautious and ensure that influencing factors are equally balanced. Due to the nature of qualitative research methods, the sample size is relatively small compared to quantitative methods such as a survey and a questionnaire. As a result, future studies will consider more data in order to enhance further applicability and utilisation of the research.

Motivation: Today’s sustainability challenges are increasingly being addressed by Product Service Systems to satisfy customers needs while lowering their overall environment impact. These systems are increasingly complex containing diverse artifacts and interactions. To provide a holistic solution centered on the human experience element, design of product-service systems are best driven by data gathered from design thinking methods.     Problem: When considering innovation challenges, such as the deployment of autonomous electric machines on future construction sites, data driven design can suffer from a lack of available tangible user feedback upon which to make design decisions.   Approach: In the case of this study, the development of a scaled down construction site structured around generally applicable operations was built as a prototype for involving various users in early phase development of a HMI for interacting with prototype machines built by Volvo CE called the HX01. Qualitative data acquisition methods were derived from Design Thinking approaches to needfinding including: a questionnaire, unstructured interviews and observations.   Results: The prototype scale site became a 5 meter x 5 meter semi-portable site with 1:11 scale ratio machines including: excavators, wheeled loaders and autonomous haulers. The product tested with the site was an augmented reality interface to provide a communication platform between workers and the autonomous haulers designed at building trust to enable collaboration. Test users and observers provided feedback confirming the effectiveness of the scale site scenario to convey the necessary context of a realistic interaction experience. Beyond HMI testing, the site served as a tangible artifact to instigate conversations across domain boundaries.   Conclusions: The tangible experiential scenario platform developed displayed the capability to go beyond one-way concept communication of concepts to customers, by including customers as integral participants in the testing of new products/services. For design teams, the site can facilitate deeper learnings and validation via a shared contextualization of user feedback. The further implications may also include: the ability to increase rationale at design decision gate’s assessment of risk in new products and enable the identification of emergent issues in complex future scenarios.

The advances in online technology has revolutionised online communication. As a result of new emerging web technologies virtual interactions have taken a much more interactive structure. These improvements in technology provide richer communication experiences for the users. Online communities, with the aid of new web 2.0 technology, provide the ideal environment for knowledge sharing. It is the interaction and communication between users of such communities that triggers information and knowledge sharing. Knowledge and information sharing sets the foundation for knowledge creation and co-creation. Meanwhile knowledge is known to be one of the greatest assets of any company or organisation. A significant amount of research has been dedicated to knowledge management. Nevertheless little research has been done to explore knowledge creation and co-creation, particularly in an online community setting. This research is investigating the idea of knowledge co-creation within an online community environment. Knowing that knowledge itself is a subjective entity, which cannot be objectively measured or quantified, the research takes an interpretive approach to finding out how this knowledge is co-created by the users of online communities. One of the main significant factors of this study is that it has used a unique and novel research method to tackle what appears to be a difficult subject. The research uses an interpretive case study method, however without any data collection. The investigation will be exclusively interpretive and philosophically evaluated based on the relevant literature and a set of principles introduced by Klein and Myers (1999). These principles were introduced as a guideline for conducting and evaluating interpretive studies in information systems. Using Klein and Myers’ principles has the advantage of being based on a well-established contemporary literature in information systems (IS) research methodology. The principles have not been used in an exclusively exploratory and interpretive research before. This itself is a major methodological contribution for future researchers to utilise as a practical example. The study develops a conceptual framework around knowledge co-creation, online communities and the technology. This framework is based on a proposed RECI model offered for knowledge creation in online communities. It also investigates the role of technology in the co-creation process. Finally it proposes a set of characteristics and guidelines that facilitate knowledge co-creation in online communities. These characteristics and guidelines would help design and implement future knowledge co-creating online communities, for example, e-learning and knowledge management systems. Furthermore the research lays the foundations for introducing the knowledge co-creation theory within online communities by proposing the initial hypothesis. Subject to appropriate future research and testing, the hypothesis can be developed into a practical theory.