Miten Software as a Service yritys voi saavuttaa pysyvän suorituskyvyn customer success yritysfunktionsa avulla?

The Software as a Service (SaaS) business model has become one of the leading ways for operating in the software business sector in today’s world. Building a SaaS business that succeeds in the long term can be particularly challenging as most of the SaaS companies operate in high-velocity software industries where reaching sustained performance requires constant and rapid innovation. A core characteristic of the SaaS business model is its interdependence on customers both on the demand side in ensuring sales, but also on the supply side as a source of critical information for sustaining the fit of the business model to the external environment. Thus, business functions such as customer success that aims at giving customers their desired outcomes by adequately interacting with them can be vital for sustaining company performance. Traditionally, service providers tended to invest to support the demand side of their business model. However, it appears that it is equally vital for companies to utilise their customer success function’s customer interactions to support the company’s supply side to renew their routines and build new capabilities. Due to this, building a customer success function in a way that serves such a strategic purpose can be challenging for companies. In this thesis, I explore the challenges companies operating within the SaaS business model may encounter in designing their customer success function to foster their capability of reconfiguring their operational routines and organisational resources and thus sustain the company’s performance. I ground this inquiry within the theoretical framework of dynamic capabilities and its intersection with knowledge management. I contextualise the study in the case of a Finnish SaaS company that sought to develop a customer success function with the intention to sustain its long-term performance. I adopted the inductive research approach and used qualitative research methodology in a single case study of a Finnish SaaS company. The results of the study suggest that customer success business function can be developed to be a source of sustained performance in SaaS companies. The customer success function should act as an interface between the company and customers and allow the company to capture knowledge from the interactions with customers and integrate the customer knowledge into the company’s capabilities and learning processes. The study suggests that in this way the company can keep reconfiguring its routines, resources, and capabilities over time, and so remain innovative and ahead of its competitors. As a theoretical implication, the thesis further expands the Easterby-Smith and Prieto’s (2008) model of linking dynamic capabilities and knowledge management. In addition, concrete recommendations for developing customer success function in the case company are drawn from the empirical data.Software as a Service (SaaS) -liiketoimintamalli on muodostunut yhdeksi johtavista tavoista tehdä ohjelmistoliiketoimintaa. SaaS-liiketoimintamallin hyödyntäminen on yleistynyt, mistä johtuen lukemattomat johtajat ympäri maailmaa yrittävät tavoitella pysyvää suorituskykyä heidän SaaS-liiketoiminnalleen. Pysysvä suorituskyky on hyvin laajasti tutkittu aihe ja akateemikot ovat muodostaneet kaksi johtavaa lähestestymistapaa asian ratkaisemiseksi. Nämä ovat dynaamiset kyvykkyydet ja tiedon johtaminen (Easterby-Smith and Prieto, 2008). Pysyvää suorituskykyä ei ole ennen tutkittu juuri SaaS-liiketoiminnan näkökulmasta eikä aiheesta ole tehty aikaisempaa akateemista tutkimusta. Tämä työ pyrkii selvittämään, miten SaaS-yritys voisi saavuttaa pysyvän suorituskyvyn määrittämällä asiakasmenestystä hallinnoivan yksikkönsä uudelleen. Asiakasmenestys on valittu työn näkökulmaksi, jotta aihe saadaan rajattua diplomityöhön sopivaksi. Pysyvän suorityskyvyn tutkiminen yrityksen tietyn funktion näkökulmasta on myös laajasti käytetty tapa aikaisemmissa akateemisissa tutkimuksissa (Schilke, Hu, and Helfat, 2017). Tämän tutkimuksen tulokset viittaavat siihen, että SaaS-yrityksen asiakasmenestysprosessi voidaan kehittää olemaan pysyvän suorituskyvyn lähde. Asiakasmenestysprosessin pitäisi toimia tehokkaana rajapintana yrityksen ja sen asiakkaiden välillä, mikä mahdollistaa tiedon keräämisen asiakkaalta. Asiakasmenestysprosessin pitäisi myös integroida kerätty asiakastieto sen omiin rutiineihin, kyvykkyyksiin ja oppimisprosesseihin. Tällä tavalla SaaS-yritys pystyy jatkuvasti kehittämään sen rutiineja, kyvykkyyksiä ja tiedon johtamiselementtejä, minkä ansiosta se pystyy pysymään innovatiivisena ja olemaan kilpailijoitaan edellä pitkällä aikavälillä

Transforming the Object in Product Design

Product design is a process in which multiple understandings of technology and society are transformed into characteristics of a product, into skills found in the design team, and finally, into scripts that prefigure the use of the technology. Because of its particular concern with mutual transformations of objects, social collectives and subjects, activity theory seems a potentially powerful framework for analyzing the complexity of product design work. I utilize the concepts of motive and object of activity to analyze an innovation process in a small high-tech company. This analysis shows that engagement with the novel objects in the design process led to a significant transformation in the expertise, organization of work and dominant motive of the work community. In theoretical terms, the analysis suggests an alternative to the idea that an activity has one objectified motive which is instantiated in an object in the material world. It may be sensible to analyze product design as poly-motivated and its motives as instantiated in a number of different project-objects

Citizen Activities in Energy Transition

This book addresses the rapidly changing citizen roles in innovation, technology adoption, intermediation, market creation, and legitimacy building for low-carbon solutions. It links research in innovation studies, sustainability transitions, and science and technology studies, and builds a new approach for the study of user contributions to innovation and sociotechnical change. Citizen Activities in Energy Transition gives detailed and empirically grounded overall appraisal of citizens’ active technological engagement in the current energy transition, in an era when Internet connectivity has given rise to important new forms of citizen communities and interactions. It elaborates a new way to study users in sociotechnical change through long-term ethnographic and historical research and reports its deployment in a major, decade-long line of investigation on user activities in small-scale renewables, addressing user contributions from the early years to the late proliferation stages of small-scale renewable energy technologies (S-RETs). It offers a much-needed empirical and theoretical understanding of the dynamics of the activities in which users are engaged over the course of sociotechnical change, including innovation, adoption, adjustment, intermediation, community building, digital communities, market creation, and legitimacy creation. This work is a must-read for those seeking to understand the role of users in innovation, energy systems change and the significance of new digital communities in present and future sociotechnical change. Academics, policymakers, and managers are given a new resource to understand the "demand side" of sociotechnical change beyond the patterns of investment, adoption, and social acceptance that have traditionally occupied their attention

Anticipated environmental sustainability of personal fabrication

Distributed manufacturing is rapidly proliferating to citizen level via the use of digital fabrication equipment, especially in dedicated “makerspaces”. The sustainability benefits of citizens’ personal fabrication are commonly endorsed. However, to assess how these maker practitioners actually deal with environmental issues, these practitioners and their practices need to be studied. Moreover research on the environmental issues in personal fabrication is nascent despite the common perception that the digital technologies can become disruptive. The present paper is the first to report on how practitioners assess the environmental sustainability of future practices in this rapidly changing field. It does so through an envisioning workshop with leading-edge makers. The findings show that these makers are well able to envision the future of their field. Roughly 25% of the issues covered had clear environmental implications. Within these, issues of energy use, recycling, reusing and reducing materials were covered widely by environmentally- oriented participants. In contrast, issues related to emerging technologies, materials and practices were covered by other participants, but their environmental implications remained unaddressed. The authors concluded there is a gap between different maker subcultures in their sustainability orientations and competences. Further research on the environmental aspects of real-life maker practices and personal fabrication technologies now could help avert negative impacts later, as the maker phenomenon spreads. This knowledge should also be directed to developing targeted environmental guidelines and solutions for personal fabrication users, which are currently lacking. Potential also lies in seeking to enhance dialogue between pro-environmental and new-technology-oriented practitioners through shared spaces, workshops and conferences.Peer reviewe

Series of configurational movements : User activities in technology generalization

The detailed studies of adoption and user activities indicate that continuous alterations accompany the proliferation of new technology, yet diffusion theory and system change-oriented frameworks portray the spread of technologies across a social or sociotechnical system with relatively few changes. To better reconcile the two orientations, we introduce a series of configurational movements (SCM) as a conceptual register for the generalization of new technology in society. We elaborate on the SCM with an over-a-decade-long investigation into heat pumps in Finland, one of the globally furthest progressed energy transitions. The process has thus far involved nine configurational movements, each featuring a change in the character of the technology, the ecology of actors relevant to it, and the contexts in which the technology spreads. SCM analysis further surfaces eight user activity types that have shaped how the technology, its deployment, and its markets have evolved: Adoption and routine use, adaption and adjustment, championing, user innovation, community building, peer intermediation, market creation and production of legitimating discourse on heat pumps. In all, the generalization features significant shifts in user practices, the technology, and societal impact throughout the process, not only during its early phases, instilling energy system wide change.© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Yritysturvallisuusjohtaminen : turvallisuuskoulutuksen kartoitus suomalaisessa turvallisuusalan yrityksessä

Siirretty Doriast

Towards a typology of intermediaries in sustainability transitions: a systematic review and a research agenda

Intermediary actors have been proposed as key catalysts that speed up change towards more sustainable socio-technical systems. Research on this topic has gradually gained traction since 2009, but has been complicated by the inconsistency regarding what intermediaries are in the context of such transitions and which activities they focus on, or should focus on. We briefly elaborate on the conceptual foundations of the studies of intermediaries in transitions, and how intermediaries have been connected to different transition theories. This shows the divergence – and sometimes a lack – of conceptual foundations in this research. In terms of transitions theories, many studies connect to the multi-level perspective and strategic niche management, while intermediaries in technological innovation systems and transition management have been much less explored. We aim to bring more clarity to the topic of intermediaries in transitions by providing a definition of transition intermediaries and a typology of five intermediary types that is sensitive to the emergence, neutrality and goals of intermediary actors as well as their context and level of action. Some intermediaries are specifically set up to facilitate transitions, while others grow into the role during the process of socio-technical change. Based on the study, as an important consideration for future innovation governance, we argue that systemic and niche intermediaries are the most crucial forms of intermediary actors in transitions, but they need to be complemented by a full ecology of intermediaries, including regime-based transition intermediaries, process intermediaries and user intermediaries

Käyttäjä tuotekehityksessä. Tieto, tutkimus, menetelmät.

Onnistunut tuotekehitys vaatii syvällistä ymmärtämystä käyttäjien toimista, tyyleistä ja haluista. Käyttäjätiedon puute on puolestaan yleisin syy tuotekehityksen epäonnistumiselle. "Käyttäjä tuotekehityksessä" on monipuolinen perusteos siitä, miten tuotekehittäjät voivat hankkia tarvitsemaansa tietämystä käyttäjistä ja käyttöympäristöistä. Teos on suunnattu käsikirjaksi tuotekehityksen ammattilaisille ja oppikirjaksi insinööri-, kauppa-, muotoilu- ja ihmistieteissä. Teos tarjoaa käsityksen siitä: (1) mistä käyttäjätieto koostuu, (2) tietoa siitä, mitä menetelmiä käyttäjien ja käytön selvittämiseen on olemassa ja perusteet niiden toteuttamisesta, (3) ymmärrystä eri menetelmien vahvuuksista, heikkouksista ja niissä tarvittavista panostuksista, (4) ongelmalähtöisiä case-esimerkkejä, jotka auttavat omaan projektiin sopivan työtavan löytämisessä, sekä (5) opastusta siihen, miten edetä perusteista eteenpäin.Peer reviewe