Corporate vision and its influence on motivation in R&D organization: Case study

In the case company X it had been found in a working climate survey that the corporate vision had not been understood by the employees of the R&D organization although the personnel have relatively high work motivation levels. Previous studies have pointed out some special features in an R&D organization, the importance of learning and innovation in R&D organizations, what motivates and how to motivate R&D personnel, etc. However, these studies could not explain the previous contradiction that had been noticed in the case company. This study aims to describe the theoretical linkages between the corporate vision and the motivational issues of R&D personnel. The role of the corporate vision in the case R&D organization has been analyzed. The issues that have more potential to motivate the R&D personnel than the corporate vision are reviewed. Furthermore, this study also attempts to give practical implications for management on these aspects. This case study uses the qualitative method to answer questions that were left open by the quantitative survey study and to deepen and give a more detailed understanding of the mentioned contradiction. This study could be said to have an abductive research methodology approach, and the researcher had some leading theories ready to be tested during the research. Considering the research objectives, the most suitable research method to collect data was the general interview guide approach. This study revealed that motivating R&D employees by a corporate vision is far-fetched. The motivation for R&D employees was coming from other substantially more important sources. On the other hand, there could be some connections between the corporate vision and motivation, that appear, e.g., in projects and organizational culture. In this study it was found that, if the corporation did not establish a R&D vision, then R&D employees practiced visionary leadership themselves to construct a realistic, believable vision for the future of their organization. It was also found that the invented personal R&D vision was based on mainly unofficial information sources and second hand rumors. If an R&D employee sees the future as unfavorable, this deteriorates the working climate and lowers motivation and output levels. Technology leadership had a mental effect on R&D employees by raising their self-esteem as engineers, and it had a positive effect on employees’ long term motivation in the case R&D organization. The issues that were related to the research process in this study were discussed with senior researchers who have generally agreed on the achieved results. Also, the key informants had reviewed the draft and agreed on the results of this study.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Product Design Validation of Tractor

Kehitettävälle tuotteelle asetetaan yleensä useita vaatimuksia, joiden tärkeimpiä lähteitä ovat käyttäjät eli asiakkaat, kilpailijat, yrityksen johdon määrittelemät strategiat sekä organisaation sisäiset tarpeet. Eri lähteistä tulevat vaatimukset ja toiveet analysoidaan, jonka tuloksena muodostuu tuotteen konsepti ja tuotespesifikaatio. Tämän työn tavoitteena on kuvata Valtran nykyisen validointikäytännön ja kirjallisuuden pohjalta järjestelmällinen validointiprosessi traktorin tuotesuunnittelua varten sekä arvioida, että miten kestoikälaskentaa ja simulointimenetelmiä voitaisiin hyödyntää entistä tehokkaammin validointiprosessissa. Työ jakautuu kahteen osaan: Kirjallisuustutkimusosassa suunnittelun validointiprosessia tarkastellaan Design for Six-Sigma – filosofian pohjalta luotujen työkalujen näkökulmasta ja muodostetaan liityntäpinnat filosofian ja käytännön toiminnan välille. Toisessa osiossa käydään läpi tutkimuksessa kuvattu tuotesuunnittelun validointiprosessi esimerkkitapauksen avulla, jossa aihetta tarkastellaan komponenttitasolla. Esimerkin komponentti on etukuormaimen runkosovite ja sille luodaan validointisuunnitelma vaatimuslistan avulla. Validointisuunnitelmaan kirjatut tarvittavat lisätiedot rakenne- ja kestoikälaskentaa sekä monikappalesimulointia varten hankitaan laboratorio- ja kenttätestauksessa suoritettavien venymä-, paine- ja kiihtyvyysmittauksien avulla. Tutkimus osoittaa, että riittävän tarkkuuden omaavan tuotespesifikaation pohjalta luotu systeemitason vaatimuslista sekä siitä johdettu komponenttitason vaatimuslista helpottaa huomattavasti validointisuunnitelman tekemistä ja luo pohjan systemaattiselle validointiprosessille. Tuotemallin analysointityökalujen tehokkaampi hyödyntäminen on mahdollista, jos ne otetaan huomioon jo validointisuunnitelman yhteydessä. Tuotemallin analysointityökalujen, kuten kestoikälaskennan ja monikappalesimuloinnin, avulla on mahdollista korvata fyysisellä prototyypillä tehtäviä validointitestejä ja pienentää näin validointikustannuksia. Jotta tuotemallin analysointityökaluja voitaisiin pitää riittävän luotettavina, ne tulee vastaavasti verifioida fyysisten testien avulla. Tarkoistakin simulointimalleista huolimatta fyysisiä testejä tarvitaan kuitenkin aina, jotta voidaan olla varmoja tuotteen toiminnasta todellisissa käyttöolosuhteissa sillä kaikkia asioita ei voida ennakoida tai simuloida

Survey of Component-Based Software Engineering within IoT Development

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing area in everyday life. New applications under the umbrella term IoT are being developed continuously. A typical IoT system consists of quite a large set of interchangeable components. In prototype development the Raspberry Pi and Arduino have become core components of wireless sensor network solutions. This research looks at how component-based software engineering (CBSE) and off-the-shelf components can be taken advantage of when defining IoT systems. We will attempt to identify the common properties of IoT systems and compare how well these properties relate to the CBSE component characteristics: composability, deployability, comprehensive documentation, independence, and standardization. The research methodology used in this study is a literature survey. The main results of the study show that CBSE is not widely used. There has been very little research on the software side of applications, as most studies have focused on describing the hardware side of implementations. The conclusion can be made that, in order for studies to be reproducible, the software side should be described in more detail.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

OSKU - an Application for Collecting User Feedback on Living Conditions in Buildings

Reducing energy consumption is currently a very topical area of research, but perhaps it is more a question of optimizing rather than reducing consumption. Preserving optimal working and living conditions within buildings should also be considered in combination with energy usage. The global rise in temperature caused by climate change may bring requirements for additional cooling of buildings, even in geographical areas that have not needed cooling in the past. In Finland, the winter months will require buildings to be heated to provide a comfortable indoor environment even in the future. A multitude of sensors exist for measuring quantities such as carbon dioxide, relative humidity, and temperature, but how well do the values measured by sensors match the subjective feelings of the people living or working inside buildings? In an attempt to discover how people feel in their working environment, we developed an application called OSKU for collecting user feedback concerning indoor air quality, and tested it in two real-life locations (a daycare center and a school), which were also fitted with sensors. In this paper we will describe the application, the use cases, and give an example of how we compared the feedback with the measured sensor values.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

Categorization of Digital Twins : A Literature Review of IoT and Industry

In recent years, the digital twin concept has gained traction in both academia and industry. But what is a digital twin? It is quite common to see many kinds of publications from scientific research to news articles on digital twins mentioning that there is no exact definition for the term. In this paper, we will go through the digital database of IEEE Xplore in an attempt to find out how the publications on digital twins use the term, and how the twins could be categorized and defined more clearly. Our focus is on literature that studies the digital twins within the context of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and industry. Our studies will show that there is indeed a need for a more standardized definition for the term, and that digital twin is often used as a blanket term to cover many systems, prototypes and implementations that may or may not be actual digital twins.Peer reviewe

Comparing the Use of Custom-built and Commercial Off-the-shelf Data Gathering Devices in IoT Systems

IoT refers to a wide range of devices that have Internet access, and collect and transmit information. Data have to be gathered from the most diverse environments. Custom data gathering devices are often necessary in situa- tions where the data being collected are unique or need to be collected in a certain way. This is because commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products may not have the necessary capabilities or features to meet the specific requirements of the data collection. This study focuses on COTS and self- built data gathering devices by comparing two data gathering prototype systems: The first designed and implemented from scratch and the second built with COTS components. Both systems are compared in terms of various features such as cost-effectiveness, time saving, and the usefulness of the output. The end goal of the study is to provide a proposal for when it is appropriate to use COTS components and when it is necessary to design and build devices yourself.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

Framework and Development Process for IoT Data Gathering

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing area in everyday life. New applications under the umbrella term IoT are being developed continually. This development has raised the need for framework definitions for different purposes. This research introduces a special software/hardware framework for data gathering systems to be used in IoT related systems. The purpose of the research is to show the usability of a certain software/hardware combination in prototype development. The software/hardware framework has been developed during several research projects by following the same prototype development process. This is proposed as a descriptive model for the prototyping process. The main contribution of this research is the framework itself. The framework consists of a model of the system with selected components. The placement of the sensor network is also presented. The purpose of the framework is to guide and assist the construction of data gathering prototypes. Furthermore, the advantages of the framework are to support re-usability, portability, and interchangeability. This research introduces the framework, its main components, and their interconnections. In addition, the prototype development process used is presented.Peer reviewe

What makes music memorable? Relationships between acoustic musical features and music-evoked emotions and memories in older adults

Background and objectives Music has a unique capacity to evoke both strong emotions and vivid autobiographical memories. Previous music information retrieval (MIR) studies have shown that the emotional experience of music is influenced by a combination of musical features, including tonal, rhythmic, and loudness features. Here, our aim was to explore the relationship between music-evoked emotions and music-evoked memories and how musical features (derived with MIR) can predict them both. Methods Healthy older adults (N = 113, age ≥ 60 years) participated in a listening task in which they rated a total of 140 song excerpts comprising folk songs and popular songs from 1950s to 1980s on five domains measuring the emotional (valence, arousal, emotional intensity) and memory (familiarity, autobiographical salience) experience of the songs. A set of 24 musical features were extracted from the songs using computational MIR methods. Principal component analyses were applied to reduce multicollinearity, resulting in six core musical components, which were then used to predict the behavioural ratings in multiple regression analyses. Results All correlations between behavioural ratings were positive and ranged from moderate to very high (r = 0.46–0.92). Emotional intensity showed the highest correlation to both autobiographical salience and familiarity. In the MIR data, three musical components measuring salience of the musical pulse (Pulse strength), relative strength of high harmonics (Brightness), and fluctuation in the frequencies between 200–800 Hz (Low-mid) predicted both music-evoked emotions and memories. Emotional intensity (and valence to a lesser extent) mediated the predictive effect of the musical components on music-evoked memories. Conclusions The results suggest that music-evoked emotions are strongly related to music-evoked memories in healthy older adults and that both music-evoked emotions and memories are predicted by the same core musical features.Peer reviewe