Browsing by Subject "innovation"

Innovation in food packaging interlinks many sustainability challenges ranging from food loss and waste through the value chains, to resource extraction and growing amounts of plastic waste globally. Food packaging innovations arising from regulation often focus on material waste and ignore other facets of sustainability such as food loss and waste. Simultaneously, conventional notions of innovations are focused on firm growth and competitiveness. This study investigates the perceptions of sustainability in food packaging among expert actors in Finland. Moreover, it examines how notions of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) are reflected in the research and development processes in the field. Here, RRI is understood as a framework for examining the role of socio-ethical considerations in research and development. The study aimed to find out which packaging attributes are considered sustainable, what motivations actors in the field have, what type of obstacles exist to innovation in the field, and which actor groups are perceived to be responsible for accelerating the food packaging transition towards sustainability. Semi-structured expert interviews were conducted with 14 participants, and the interview data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis (QCA). The results show that perceptions of sustainability in food packaging vary across the field. However, reducing food waste and loss was considered the most important facet of sustainability in food packaging. Actors in the field are motivated by personal reasons and the anticipated profitability of sustainable innovations. However, innovations in the field are slowed down because of regulatory issues, food safety requirements, unpredictable future changes, and technological lock-ins. Finally, the results of this study indicate that actors in the sector believe the Finnish government and brand owners in the food and beverage industries should be responsible for driving innovation towards improved sustainability. However, the qualitative approach taken here limits the generalizability of the results. The results suggest an ongoing narrative shift in innovation towards greater inclusion of social and ethical considerations in the research and development process.

The aim of this thesis is to explore how the Finnish state has adopted knowledge branding as a way to improve Finland’s competitiveness during the 21st century, and simultaneously examine what contesting imaginaries of competitiveness are underlying its work due to challenges posed by climate change. In policy spheres, knowledge branding refers to the act of knowledge being packaged into saleable and user-friendly “toolkits”, i.e. knowledge brands, by renowned consultants, policy experts and academics. These knowledge brands are manifested through international ranking institutions, which are assessing countries according to various performance areas. This has only enhanced the global competition between nations. Today, the long predominance of market-liberal imaginaries around globalization, competitiveness and the knowledge-based economy has been seriously contested due to the climate crisis demanding a greener economy. These green ideas have translated into new knowledge brands such as ’sustainability’, ’carbon neutrality’ and ‘circular economy’. However, despite the apparent clash of two contradictory sets of beliefs, capitalist growth aims have continued to thrive, showing flexible adaptation in the form of hybridization. As a result we see phenomena such as climate capitalism, carbon compensation and carbon trading. Since I find that the CPE field lacks a collective notion describing different degrees of such hybridization of ideas, I introduce the concept of ‘hybrid imaginary’ to denote the dynamic alignment of traditional capitalist, consumerist ideas with the more altruistic worldview of global responsibility and environmental sustainability. Theoretically, I support myself on the cultural political economy (CPE) approach, which regards imaginaries as necessary for us to be able to structure and make sense of the complexity of the world. More recently, CPE has explored the adoption of knowledge brands in public policy spheres. Considering the fact that Finland, branding itself as “A land of solutions”, has received much positive attention in recent years due to its success in international rankings, and today also aspires to be the world’s first fossil-fuel free country by 2035, I find my home country to be an interesting case to examine in terms of increased use of knowledge branding in the state sector. Methodologically, I approach this topic by conducting a combined qualitative content and discourse analysis on the fairly new state operator Business Finland and its predecessor Finpro (1999-2017). The operator promotes Finnish competitiveness in the fields of internationalization of enterprises, investments and the travel industry by the help of its huge network of consultants, thus making it fit for knowledge branding. Hence, my research question is as follows: “How has Business Finland adopted knowledge branding as a way to improve Finland's competitiveness during the 21st century and what contesting imaginaries of competitiveness are underlying its work?”. The analysis consists of three dimensions: 1) organizational reforms during the 21st century enabling knowledge branding; 2) nation branding as an example of a knowledge brand applied by the travel promotion unit Visit Finland; and 3) Business Finland’s use of hybrid imaginaries in response to the climate crisis. The results of the analysis show that Business Finland has become increasingly dynamic in response to global pressure, while the operator’s current focus on climate innovations shows how ‘responsibility’ and ‘sustainability’ are treated as competitive factors. Thus, my main conclusive argument is that when environmental values are utilised for national competitiveness purposes, their morally good nature may become distorted. This observation resonates with the fact that sustainability and responsibility have become performances measured through global indexes. So, paradoxically, the good intentions of government strategies for mitigating climate change are in danger of being held back due to the excessive focus on individual performance, instead of finding ways to join forces for more collaborative transnational efforts. Ultimately, hybrid imaginaries in combination with an increased commercialization of knowledge raises concerns for the long-term effects on our human ability to imagine alternative futures in writing the narrative of climate change.

Innovation is an important theme in economics and economic history because modern societies with sustained economic growth are based on constant creation and employment of new technology. This thesis studies the role of individuals and organisations in creating innovations in Finland in the period 1880-1940. A debate in economic history of innovation concerns the notion that innovation was driven by individual inventors without support of formal training and an organisation around them until late 19th century. The alleged transition from independent to dependent innovation created by formally trained inventors within firms in the early 20th century implies that innovation activities would have intensified in the period and, using more of state-of-the-art knowledge, would have produced more innovations of a higher quality. The novelties of this thesis are its focus on independent inventorship in Finland and exceptional focus on inventor careers through biographical or prosopographic data. Finland is an interesting object of study due to a research gap. Finnish technological development has been studied before in literature. However, earlier literature has not addressed the question of independent and dependent innovation in Finland. Literature using historical Finnish patent data has addressed other themes such as patenting by foreigners before the First World War and technology markets. The major data source in this thesis is the Finnish patent database created in a research project at the University of Helsinki. It contains data on patents registered in Finland in 1842-1940 of which I use data on years 1880-1940. I measure this increased quality and complexity of inventing through a quantitative measure, the duration of patents. The variable is used often in quantitative historical literature to measure the quality of patents. As an additional indicator of patent quality, I check the distribution of technological International Patent Classifications (IPC) of patents. I study the distributions by looking at individual and organisation patentees from Finland, Sweden, Germany and the rest of the world’s countries to assess the role of technology and human capital transfer from abroad to Finland. I also use additional prosopographic or biographical data on 93 Finnish inventors with patents in the Finnish patent database between 1910 and 1940 except for two inventors with biography patents prior to 1910. I take the biographical data from two biography databases of Finnish Literature Society (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura), the National Biography of Finland and Talouselämän vaikuttajat. I match the data in biographies with patent data in Finnish patent database. I use these biographies to assess in more detail the formal training, career paths, international connections, economic sectors of work and social background of inventors. The main contribution of this thesis is showing that most inventors worked in organisations when inventing in Finland in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Besides independent inventors actually being dependent, the official patent data seems to show that firms, particularly foreign firms from Sweden and Germany, were important drivers of innovation and economic growth in Finland since the early 1920s. Foreign firms were particularly important in high-tech sectors like chemistry. Independent innovation was rare in Finland already in the late 19th century and early 20th century as innovation was largely carried out by firms and, when studied through prosopographic data, allegedly independent inventors were actually working in or for firms in some way. The results of this thesis are similar to earlier literature on other Nordic countries. The results on biography patents reveal that the official patent data understate the professional and social background of inventors. Even though many inventors were presented in official patent records as engineers, most of the inventors in the biography sample, around 50-60 per cent, were managers, board members or owners of firms when inventing. Inventors had clear occupational continuity in their career. Most inventors had a lot of formal training as over 60 per cent of biography patent inventors had an academic education. Many inventors had education and work experience from abroad, mostly from Germany, Sweden, the USA and Russia. Most inventors had worked most of their career or the second longest term of their careers in someone else’s firm or their own firm. However, there is speculative evidence in this thesis that work history in the public sector or the academia can help inventors to provide high quality technology. The social mobility of inventors was low as most inventors had an upper middle-class or high social background: most inventors were either engineers, managers or non-technical experts and so were their fathers.

I denna avhandling undersöks betydelsen av offentliga institutioner för innovation i Europa. Innovation ses i dag som en viktig drivare av tillväxt samt som lösningen till en mängd lömska problem, såsom klimatförändring och pandemier. Syftet i denna studie är att utreda om offentlig sektor spelar en större roll för innovation än vad den samhälleliga diskursen i allmänhet förutsätter. Att känna till hurdan effekt offentliga institutioner har på innovation är av stor betydelse då offentlig sektor ställs inför reformer och krav på förändring. Offentliga institutioner innefattar i denna studie framför allt värderingar som tillsammans bildar en god och fungerande förvaltning. Sambandet mellan offentliga institutioner och innovation undersöks med variabler ur Global Innovation Index 2019. Som analysenheter fungerar 38 europeiska länder. Indexet valdes som material framför allt på grund av dess lämpliga, transparenta och tidsenliga indikatorer. Först används korrelationsanalys för att kartlägga sambanden mellan offentliga institutioner och uppkomst respektive spridning av innovation. Sedan undersöks effekten av institutioner på innovation vidare med hjälp av regressionsanalys. Den statistiska analysen visar att effekten av offentliga institutioner är mycket stark både för uppkomst och för spridning av innovation. Regressionsmodellen kan ge signifikanta förutsägelser, då institutioner förklarar kring hälften av variansen i innovation hos Europas länder. En offentlig sektor präglad av god och fungerande förvaltning visar sig storligen gynna innovativiteten i samhället överlag. Dessutom kan en sådan offentlig sektor vara en legitim ledare för innovation genom nätverk till privat och tredje sektor. Empiriskt stöd finns för att samtliga offentliga värderingar spelar en stor roll, men det är möjligt att värderingarna deltagande och transparens är särskilt betydelsefulla för fungerande innovationsnätverk. Implikationerna av resultaten är omfattande för Europas offentliga sektorer. En omställning i det offentligas roll för innovation är nödvändig, samtidigt som centrala värderingar som transparens och ansvarsutkrävande måste värnas om i kommande offentliga reformer. Förändring behövs för att bemöta framtidens utmaningar, men för att möjliggöra hög innovativitet bör offentliga institutioner snarare förstärkas än nedmonteras. Resultaten av denna studie ger grund för en offentlig sektor med starka offentliga institutioner och ett större fokus på innovation. Det är troligt att innovation sker bäst inom ett innovationssystem där offentlig, privat och tredje sektor samarbetar, under offentlig ledning.

The Information Age has brought enormous changes for journalism. At Svenska Yle the journalism team Grävnavet has specialised in learning new technology for doing Data journalism and Investigative journalism, while also attempting to teach their collegues about new methods and providing them with new content and ideas. Swedish-language news organisations in Finland have, like many others, been struggling to adapt to the Internet era and at the time of the study Grävnavet was the only team focusing on Data journalism. This case study examines the role Grävnavet plays for Swedish-language journalism in Finland through participant observation and a group interview with the journalists in the team. The study shows that the team gained a lot of liberty through specialising in a field that their supervisors didn’t comprehend, while still having to produce results. The team invested a lot of time in fewer projects, attempting to reach larger audiences or creating automated content. The audience was constantly monitored as the team tried to make the content attractive through Data journalism or interactive content. The biggest challenge for the team was writing code. The team members were not programmers, but journalists who had learned to use code in their work. At the same time the team’s working methods and goals were very different from those of the technicians, which complicated their collaboration. The study supports the idea that Data journalism is a useful journalistic method, also in Swedish-language media in Finland. Grävnavet can also be seen as a research and development project, with the aim to develop journalistic working practice. As such, the team can be seen as a cost effective investment in innovation, since they simultaneously provided content.

Mitt syfte med denna avhandling är att utifrån tidigare forskning redogöra för 1) hur kreativitetsprocessen ser ut i teamarbete, 2) faktorer som verkar hämmande på denna kreativitetsprocess och 3) faktorer som verkar gynnande på denna sociala kreativitetsprocess i team. I dag genomgår såväl arbetslivet som marknaden en snabb förändring. Kreativitet är centralt för att organisationen ska kunna anpassa sig till omgivningar och marknader i förändring och för att organisationen genom kreativitet kan uppnå innovation och framgång. Kreativt arbete genomförs ofta i team. En litteraturgenomgång har visat att kreativitet i teamarbete är ett mångfacetterat fenomen som inte har en entydig definition. Med kreativitet i organisationskontext avses ett fenomen där ett team eller en arbetstagare utvecklar en för organisationen användbar och lämplig metod, idé eller produkt. Det finns vissa specifika faktorer som verkar hämmande på idégenereringsprocessen i teamarbete. Bland de centrala hämmande faktorerna är individens brist på inre motivation för kreativ idégenerering och hens oförmåga att kunna beakta andra teammedlemmars perspektiv och idéer. En brist på stöd och feedback från organisationen och ledarskapet verkar även negativt på kreativitetsprocessen i teamarbete. Däremot verkar en stark inre motivation för kreativt arbete, en mångfald av perspektiv hos teammedlemmarna och en god förmåga att kunna beakta dessa andra perspektiv främjande på kreativitetsprocessen i teamarbete. Teamet bör ha tillräckligt med handlingsfrihet i processen och en uppfattning om att kreativitet kommer att uppskattas inom organisationen. Ledarskap som betonar relationerna i organisationen stärker personligt initiativtagande och därmed också kreativiteten bland arbetstagarna. Fortsatta studier om hur processen och kommunikationen ser ut i teamarbete under kreativ idégenerering skulle behövas för att man ska kunna skapa en fördjupad uppfattning om de hämmande faktorerna och om hur dessa kan elimineras.

Mål. Forskningsobjektet för detta examinationsarbete är ledning av pedagogiska processer i företag. Dagens snabbt föränderliga arbetsmarknad sätter krav för kontinuerligt lärande i organisationer samt kunskapshantering, den här undersökningen strävar att bidra till forskningen inom dessa utmaningar. Denna undersökning utgår från tidigare forskning inom pedagogik i företagsverksamhet, mera specifikt undersöker studierna ledarskapets roll i pedagogiska processerna i företags kontext. Genom att undersöka tidigare studier har undersökningen som mål att hitta konkreta förslag för hur pedagogiska processer kan ledas på ett framgångsrikt sätt. Metoder. Arbetet genomförs som en beskrivande litteraturstudie på åtta forskningar inom temana ledarskap, kunnande, lärande och resultatskapande. Forskningarna som analyserats för detta arbete är kvantitativa, och har genomförts på olika geografiska områden under de senaste tio åren. Forskningarna är akademiska och de har valts genom specifika sökord från diverse journaler och Google Scholar. Kvaliteten av källorna har analyserats systematiskt med tanke på år, plats och tema. Forskningarna har först grundligt analyserats och sedan har dess resultat jämförts för att hämta fram svar på forskningsfrågan i detta arbete. Resultat och slutsatser. Resultaten visar att pedagogiska processer kan ledas på ett framgångsrikt sätt i företag då ledarna är kompetenta inom sin uppgift. Det visade sig att en förståelse för pedagogik är till nytta i värdeskapande. Det visar sig också att företag vilkas ledarskap använder kunskap som ett verktyg inom sin praxis är ofta framgångsrika på marknaden. Som ett tredje resultat kommer den här undersökningen fram till att transformativt ledarskap har visat sig korrelera positivt med att skap värde ur pedagogiska processer. Som slutsats kommer det här arbetet fram med att ledning av pedagogiska processer bör vara systematiskt, planerat och reflekterande till sin natur.

Technology companies have challenged the incumbent banks in payments. Their digital and personalized services utilize their expertise in cloud computing, AI, and machine learning. In addition, global tech giants or BigTech are providing bank-like services capitalizing on well-established brands, significant financial resources, and access to behavioral data. Competition has increased efficiency, expanded access to finance, improved market diversification, and helped recovery from the pandemic, but also increased cyber risks, reliance on infrastructure providers, and excess volatility that might aggregate to systemic problems inhibiting growth and diminishing welfare. The thesis highlights the factors behind the emergence of digital competitors and examines their stability implications with an extensive literature review. The swift emergence has been caused by technological development, changes in market structure and regulation, and distrust in banks. Technological change has made possible the development of new products and services that agile startups have utilized while banks have struggled to complete the expensive digitalization process of their services. Increased regulation and low-interest rates have also hindered banks' ability to compete with the entrants. In addition to efficiency raising financial inclusion has been one of the core positives brought by FinTech as affordable solutions have allowed previously unbanked groups to get services. However, entrants have been able to work under lower levels of supervision. Regulatory arbitrage can increase volatility and aggregate into system-wide risks through contagion. Some experts are concerned that the ongoing transformation in the financial sector could result in disintermediation, where banks may play a reduced role in the digital financial landscape. This has raised concerns about the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission. Studies suggest that as banks become less important, the impact of monetary policy shocks on lending and the real economy may be diminished. This could pose challenges in maintaining stability. The full extent of FinTech’s effect on market stability is yet to be determined. However, studies have shown its positive role in digitizing the financial industry, enhancing product and service quality, and recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. Regulation plays a crucial role in balancing innovation and stability. Prematurely imposing restrictions on emerging innovations may hinder the progress that could otherwise enhance overall welfare. Regulators aim to protect consumers and ensure a level playing field. Striking the right balance is essential to foster innovation while mitigating risks. The regulator’s challenge is to combine fostering innovation and competition while limiting malpractice but also to provide a level playing field for firms. This objective is complicated by the rapid pace of development, classification problems, and tradeoffs between increased market efficiency and stability.

Studies have shown that the platform companies Google and Facebook have a disruptive nature in how media companies organise their work, and some researchers claim they are a duopoly in digital advertising. However, Google says it supports media by “helping” media industries through funding and training. This study argues that by examining what media projects Google supports, we get a good overview of what challenges journalism is currently facing and the solutions for tackling these problems, and ultimately, how this connects to Google as a platform company and to its narrative. This study aims to investigate which media industry challenges Google tries to address by financial support and to examine the solutions to these challenges proposed in accepted Digital News Innovation Fund (DNI) projects. Thus, this research asks: What are the challenges for media and journalists that Google Digital News Initiative is addressing? What specific challenges get the largest support? What are the main solutions proposed in projects supported by Google DNI? Based on the review of the literature about the relationships between platform companies and media and responses to challenging conditions in the ecosystem of platforms, qualitative content analysis was used to examine the last round of the DNI Fund’s 102 projects. The analysis demonstrated that Google supports projects that classify in three directions: Business Model Innovations, Product Development in Editorial Processes and Ecosystem Development Approaches. One of the most interesting findings shows that Google favours supporting projects that concern solutions for the increase in audience subscriptions rather than addressing what publishers have concerns about the most – Google’s domination over the digital advertisement. The results open the discussion about the possible signs of Google’s support in media industries being a “self-help” for their mission of organising the world’s information. Further research is needed to identify what is the content of the other projects Google presents as “help” to media industries.