The pace of technological development is rapid, which pressures companies to keep up. Companies are required to remain flexible and experiment for the future while at the same time being efficient to leverage and capitalize on existing business. Ambidexterity describes the balance of this mutual interplay of flexibility and efficiency. However, in-depth research on how ambidexterity is achieved is still missing.

To explore this gap, this study examines the software development industry closely as it is characterized by rapid technological advancement and fierce competition. The nature of software development mandates a balance between flexibility and efficiency.

The results of this study contribute to and advance the research of ambidexterity by examining how the software development industry achieves this balance.

Author: Camilla Reis

The mobility sector is facing an unprecedented transformation towards less carbon-intensive and highly efficient passenger mobility and freight transportation systems and therefore seeking for the emergence of new business models (BMs) as well as the innovation of already existing ones. In this thesis, a systematic literature review, case study research, and qualitative content analysis will be applied to gain expertise on extant and novel BMs, analyze implications of new technologies/services on BMs, and identify related scenarios for the future.

Author: Florian Ratz

The highly intertwined nature of today’s economic life has rendered the consideration of direct and indirect external influences on a company’s success a strategic necessity. This is especially true for industries whose products or services have become too complex to be entirely developed and produced internally by one single company. To explain a company’s success in these contexts, the concept of innovation ecosystems has been introduced. Innovation ecosystems consist of actors that are bound to each other through the non-generic complementarity of their contributions to an innovative common value proposition. Very often, the progress of these ecosystems is hampered by bottlenecks. Bottlenecks are components of the ecosystem’s value proposition that hamper its attractiveness due to limited technological performance, quality, availability, access or high costs relative to other components of the same value proposition. As a consequence of bottlenecks’ criticality, existing research has especially stressed the significance of actors’ strategies to purposefully address them. In this study, a systematic literature review, case study research and qualitative comparative analysis will be applied to identify strategies that actors involved in ecosystems around battery electric vehicles can use to purposefully address bottlenecks.

Author: Thomas Draschbacher

Cooperations contribute to maintaining and expanding the competitiveness and innovation capability of companies.  In particular, collaborations between established companies and startups offer great potential, as each can offer something that the other lacks. Interviews and case studies will be used to find out why or why not, and in what form the established companies cooperate with startups or young companies, what benefits and challenges the cooperations bring with them and what effect the cooperations have on the business models of the two cooperation partners.

Author: Elisabeth Stiegler

Over the last years the concept of sustainable development has more and more been addressed by the business sector. Innovative as well as sustainable business models are needed to achieve both economic and environmental goals. The dissertation project will focus on sustainable business models of start-ups in order to better understand how they operate and what the drivers for developing these business models are. Using a cross-industry sample covering start-ups showing notable sustainable activities, this study aims to analyse the characteristics of their business model. 

Author: Martin Glinik

The object of this thesis is to discuss the interrelationships between Lean Management and Technology Management. Through an in-depth analysis into the methods, processes, and useful interconnections of both management techniques, the findings will be implemented back into the existing Technology Management process to help create a more efficient and lean program for the betterment of all companies. This process can be applied in the field to ensure companies’ insistence on a long-term basis.

Author: Jürgen Kiszilak

Small enterprises (SE) increasingly face a competitive business environment, where they have to compete with firms of any size. Furthermore, a small enterprise is not just a small version of a large enterprise (LE). Which is why SEs business models significantly differ from LEs business models. In a qualitative study small enterprises in business-to-business markets are researched. The purpose of the study is to find factors that, according to literature, influence the elements of SEs business models most and to analyze to what degree those factors are present in the sample cases.

Author: Fabian Pirker

In today's software developing firms software product management (SPM) is part of business and it is done often by practitioners to the best of their knowledge and belief. Nevertheless many scientific research has been done on this topic. The dissertation project covers a systematic mapping study about the research which have been done within last recent years. The second part of this dissertation will focus on empirical research on SPM under particular consideration of medium- and large-sized business applications.

Author: Thomas Salzmann