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Background: Due to the increasing ageing population worldwide, humanity is facing global demographic challenges. For many people, their later years are often lived with changed functioning and the need for support in daily living activities. Assistive technology and welfare technology (AT/WT) constitute a partial solution to the demographic challenges. Objectives: The purpose of this literature review is to identify the policy features, such as decision models and guidance for the provision of AT/WT as reported in the current scientific literature. Methods: A literature review with a deductive approach using the structure of the Global Cooperation on Assistive Technology (GATE) model was conducted. The data were searched from the databases: PubMed, Cinahl Plus, and the Web of Science, resulting in nine included articles. Results: The findings are presented according to the structure of the eight domains from the GATE model— policy, assessment, procurement, technology, environment, usability, sustainability and rights— which are further grouped into categories exploring the variations in every domain. Conclusion: The review reveals a nascent and growing interest in the area; however, evidence-based decision models and other guidance on AT/WT are lacking. Recent scholarships and policy reforms can form the basis of stronger guidance to organise complex AT/WT systems, but further and future research is needed.

Assistive and welfare technology (AT/WT) has been introduced as a way of facing an ageing population and providing support for older adults in their daily lives. There is much research concerning the assessment and recommendation of AT/WT to individual end-users. However, few studies have explored AT/WT decision-making from a managerial perspective. This study explores what aspects influence decision-making in assistive technology organizations concerning new technology procurements. The study is based on interviews with 24 managers engaged in assistive technology organizations, representing 13 of 21 regions in Sweden. The interview data consisted of the participants’ experiences deciding on AT/WT procurement. A reflexive inductive thematic analysis was used to identify aspects that influenced decision-making. The main findings show that decision-making is in the making, meaning that decision-making is a constant on-going managerial process. Furthermore, the findings show that managers experience uncertainty in the decision-making, sometimes make ad hoc decisions and request an evidence-based, person-centred approach to improve decision-making. The study concludes that supportive, technology, patient, and knowledge aspects influence managers’ decisions.

We witness a growing interest in the marketing area regarding the relationship between marketing theory and marketing practice, the usefulness of marketing models, or how firms carry out their marketing practice. The business discipline has since long taken an interest in the practical use of theories, i.e., as stated by Kurt Levin (1951): “There is nothing as practical as a good theory.” However, the theory-practice linkage has to a limited degree been transferred into the classroom, and only a few studies have so far focused on the effects of bringing practice into the classroom. There are some notable examples of nursing and medicine studies and disciplines that are known for applying reflective practice. However, there is a lack of this research within management and marketing literature. A common way of achieving practice-related assignments is to bring the students into the field, but what happens when you bring the field to the classroom? This can, for example, be done by introducing practice into the classroom by involving practitioners – i.e., executives, managers, consultants, and so forth – in student assignments. Well managed, this means that (a) the student gets to engage in a real-world-like setting and (b) that the student can reflect upon both his or her action and all the nuances of the (practical) event. In this study, we aim to contribute to our understanding regarding the effect of bringing marketing practitioners into the class-learning situation by (i) investigating how such learning experiences affect the students learning and (ii) what kind of learning the practitioner-based activity gives. Our goal is to shed some light on what kind of learning process “practice” in the classroom leads to and what kind of obstacles and benefits there are. We do this by carrying out an explorative study following grounded theory. Our research is inspired by grounded theory and it complements current marketing and management pedagogy studies. While working with cases allows the teacher to design a learning opportunity with clear intended learning outcome (ILO), or using simulation tools, these are artificial situations that do not reflect all the nuances of a “real-life” business situations. Internships do offer the student these nuances, but they are hard to connect to specific ILOs. We focus on a learning methodology that integrates the best of these two practice-oriented methods – i.e., having clear ILOs and bringing business atmosphere into the classroom. The study span 60 individual written student reflections and the results indicate different aspects of the students’ learning process. We coded the students’ renderings and categorized the findings into second-order constructs. Thereafter, the results were compiled, through axial coding, into a conceptual model that should be used for further development and exploration. The model indicates that learning is not only related to the student’s qualities and form of learning triggers; it is also moderated by the student’s emotions and how well the assignment is carried out and understood. The study is a novel attempt to increase our knowledge of how this type of assignments affects the students as well as lead to the fulfillment of ILOs.

In this paper we study the doings of practitioners in established firms and how theydraw on practices in the opportunity- and advantage-seeking process. A processreferred to as strategic entrepreneurship (SE) by many scholars. SE is not a newphenomenon, thus it has been research in this area by scholars in the domain ofentrepreneurship as well as in strategic management. However it has only recently beenconceptualized into a construct of practice. A problem though is when trying to furtherconceptualize this research area, to learn more about the practice of SE, previousresearch has a tendency to ignore the actions of humans and the unit-of-analysis hasbeen on a level of the industry, firm and/or resources. Therefore, in this paper wesuggest an alternative unit-of-analysis that draws on social practice theory and theconcepts of practice, praxis and practitioners. Thus, incorporate more of human actionsin the SE-process.

Recent literature indicates that a majority of studies on R&D management control have

focused on performance measurement systems and that few studies have explored how

individual control systems operate collectively to influence the outcome of R&D

organizations. We adopt the idea that it is of importance to merge control systems, and we

draw upon levers of control to view control systems from a holistic viewpoint. We aim to

extend this research by to exploring how beliefs, boundary, diagnostic and interactive control

systems are used jointly to influence the outcome of R&D. The paper is based on a qualitative

within-case study of an industrial air-handling technology R&D firm in Sweden. We draw on

the levers of control framework developed by Simons (1995) to illustrate how management

control systems operate within an R&D context. We observed that management control

systems interact in an R&D organization and that it is this interaction that allows it to achieve

pre-set goals. We also found that R&D firm managers used various forms of control jointly to

attain a limitation in behaviour as well as continuous search for opportunities and new

possibilities by exploiting existing technologies and resources.

In this paper, we explore how an educational programme can be designed to support managers in learning systematic innovation practices, contributing to the Innovation Management community. Using the community of practice (CoP) concept, we developed a programme to educate managers in systematic innovation practices, including systematic innovation work, innovation climate, and the creation of innovation teams. Our contribution builds on prior studies on the CoP construct. Using a case study with a mixed-methods design, we have explored the educational experiences of ten managers and the practical outcome of their organisations’ participation in the programme. Based on mixed data, we conclude that the educational programme “Management Education on Systematic Innovation Practices” (MEoSIP) supports managers’ understanding of systematic innovation practices in theory and in practice. It also contributes to practitioners who can support clients in improving innovation-related abilities. Agencies can develop training programmes using CoP for other educational purposes. Further research is proposed.

One of the requirements that practitioners have on educators is to prepare students for their future professions. A task for educators is therefore to introduce teaching methods and procedures for students that encourage them to develop their analytical skills and ability to solve real-world business problems. In this paper, we introduce a pedagogical tool named ‘The Game’ to help educators with this task.

The general pedagogical idea of ‘The Game’ is to create a learning environment which allows students to be actively engaged in their learning process. It was developed to reinforce the importance of intercultural collaboration and negotiation as well as allowing them to be able to reflect on business-behavior directly instead of using case-studies.

The game is based on a market where students get to experience business undertakings. The game is designed for international master students (representing on average between 10-15 countries) but can be used in a monocultural setting as well. The game will allow them to get more insights into strategy, marketing, management, organization and pricing.  

Researchers claim that experiential learning approaches (e.g., gamification) are well-suited to management and entrepreneurship education. However, this research has been conducted mostly in small classroom settings. With the increases in the number of university business students, many business courses have also increased in size. The large classroom setting introduces new pedagogic concerns, in particular regarding the complexity of the teaching–learning environment, as a result of students having diverse educational backgrounds, skills, and learning styles. This article explores this concern in its investigation of the ways in which business higher education can prompt various business behaviors among students in large classrooms.By utilizing the gamification of concepts, we created an experiential learning exercise—the Strategic Business Game. Questionnaire surveys conducted with the 126 university students enrolled into two majors during the game reveal that this educational learning experience prompts the students’ causation and effectuation behaviors. In this educational learning experience, the complexity of the large classroom is seen as an advantage and gives the educators an opportunity to increase the quality of the student interaction. Furthermore, this study emphasizes the appropriateness of experiential learning through gamification on individuals’ business behaviors as revealed in large classes in management and entrepreneurship education.

Which conditions are needed for research and development firms to stay competitive? Such firms must continually develop new products and processes if they are to provide their customers with value, and equal, if not exceed, the offerings their competitors provide. Firms that lack sufficient innovation and creativity risk losing customers, their reputation, and their position in corporate structures and in their industries.

Even worse, they may be forced to liquidate their assets, file for bankruptcy, merge with other divisions, or be sold. There are many possibilities, and few of them can be said to be positive for the firm, its owners, or its employees. However, this thesis tells the story of how a Sweden-based firm, which was divided and sold to foreign, multinational corporations, survived as three separate research and development firms in southern Sweden. It examines how these three firms (all working in air handling technology) built on their historic legacy and continued as significant players in their industry.

The analysis takes a resource-based view in its examination of the firms’ competitive advantage derived from its resources and resource management. The examination is based on Jay Barney’s VRIN framework and Robert Simons’s Levers of Control framework. The analysis identifies and describes the firms’ technical, financial, human and relationship resources, and analyses whether these resources are strategic or complementary.It confirms previous research that finds research and development firms can stay competitive if they have strategic resources such as test facilities, employees with expertise and experience, and strong relationships with suppliers and customers. It also finds that complementary resources such as information technology contribute to the competitiveness of research and development firms.

The contribution of this thesis to previous research is its analysis of the significant role management control has in managing the resources of research and development firms. The thesis develops a management control model for such firms – the Integrated Resource Management model – that has four alternatives resource management strategies. These strategies are: Bureaucratic Resource Management, Structured Resource Management, Flexible Resource Management, and Explorative Resource Management.

The aim of this study is to contribute to the debate on publish and perish, which is a phenomenon that, for a long time, has been a theme of discussion. This phenomenon has affected many academic disciplines (Miller et al. 2011), including accounting. It is described to be the result of the increased competition that has developed based on the desire to identify the productiveness of universities, departments and faculties. It has created the pressure on scholars to produce quality outputs in the form of publications in high-ranked international refereed journals.

This study adopts the idea that high-ranked academic journals are setting the context for what is valid and not valid in accounting scholarship, i.e. high-ranked international refereed journals becomes the prevalent discourse for how researchers supposed to write and think about research in accounting scholarship.

The purpose of this paper is through a discourse analysis study if the same phenomena that are apparent in the prevalent discourse of accounting set by top journals also can be seen in the less prestigious and lower-ranked journals of accounting.

In the usual case a PhD student is enrolled and supervised at an academic faculty, in Sweden also most often employed at a department of the university. The whole doctoral education takes part in one single environment. There is an opportunity to enroll “classes” of industrial PhD students in industrial graduate schools. The PhD student is in these cases most often employed by an industry. Each PhD student has at least one academic supervisor, but also an industrial mentor. Sometimes the industrial mentor also holds a PhD and can formally also be an industrial co-supervisor. Even if the funding of the PhD student is a research project, the doctoral work is often not performed as a project. There are often severe delays of the dissertation. The public defense often happens a year after the funding has ended. This represents a large cost for the university or for the industry. The progression of the student lies outside the control of the university management and also the funding industry. We have conducted a case study to explore the organizing of PhD work with the purpose to describe whether project methodology could support industrial PhD students in their progression towards a PhD.

The transition towards a circular economy (CE) is part of the solution to reduce the global consumption of natural resources and increase resource efficiency in society. Product-Service Systems (PSS) is seen as one of the effective ways of moving towards a CE. PSS leads to an increase in product use by sharing or renting, and by extending material and product lifecycles through repair, remanufacturing, reuse and recycling. Therefore, designing PSSs have great potential to facilitate the CE transition. Many SMEs show an increased interest in a CE transition; however, they fall short in taking the right path towards designing PSS. Designing PSSs involve a rearrangement of resources, and SMEs usually do not possess the same resources as larger firms. Previous research clarifies that the transition from traditional product design to designing PSS is challenging for SMEs. This paper adds insights to the PSS literature and industrial practices through a single-case study by identifying and describing the challenges an SME may face when intending to design PSS. The data is based on interviews, workshops, and internal archive documents. The findings show that an SME faces both internal and external challenges. The internal challenges related to time constraints, the current business model, lack of financial resources, organisational structure and internal processes, dedicated employees for business and service development, and competence. The external challenges relate to SMEs position in the value chain, customer interests in PSS solutions, and handling of reversed logistics.