Master Thesis (6)

Thesis Defense

After several months of hard work on the Master Thesis, the final seminar represents the last step of the semester, and thus, of these 2 years within the SMIO program. As discussants, the aim of the final seminar is to critically scrutinize a thesis and bring out both strengths and weaknesses through dialogue a dialogue with its authors. The authors should have the opportunity to shine and show off their great knowledge by answering both intelligent and tricky questions.

A usual thesis is 70 to 100 page-long, which gives enough room for questions and comments from the opponents to the authors.

The final seminar was structured as the following:

1. The authors have 2 min. to point out critical mistakes they have discovered after printing the thesis (as forgetting a 'not' in a sentence which completely changes the message).
2. The opponents hold a 10 min. presentation of the authors' thesis. As the audience is supposed to have read the thesis as well, it is basically a concise summary to show how it has been understood. It is customary to ask the authors if the presentation did their work justice or if they would like to add something (approx. 2 min.).
3. Then, the discussion/defense begins and lasts 45 min. The discussants lead the seminar, ask questions (big and important issues, first; small details come if there is time left), initiate discussions, point-out strengths and weaknesses in the thesis, and invite comments from the audience. The authors should answer the questions, explain their reasoning, and show extensive understanding. The discussants normally end their section by giving some sort of judgment of the qualities of the author's thesis.
4. The advisor and co-examiner have the word for 15 min. to give an overall judgment of the thesis as well as the defense and they can ask some final questions if needed.
5. The opponents give to the authors a 5 pages-long hand-out with all their comments and questions. Additionally, the opponents can also provide the authors with the annotated manuscript if desired. 
6. Once all the defenses are held (over two and a half days), all advisors will convene and discuss the quality of the theses and decide upon the final grades.

This 1h15 final seminar is the place to shine for the authors. It is a final test of explanation. Discussions can even go beyond the thesis' borders. Although some of the groups exchanged their questions beforehand, including the audience in the discussion bring criticism and make the discussions more alive.

I personally enjoyed defending my thesis. Mario and I had the chance to show our understanding of the concepts we used, the reasons behind it and to open-up for further research as well as implications for the existing theories. We received really good feedback from the supervisor Marie Bengtsson and co-examiner Jonas Söderlund, thus we are expecting a decent grade reflecting their opinions :)

Mario

Me

IT'S OVER.

Overall, this Master Thesis was a good experience. Quite stressful when nothing work out as planned, of course, but it helped us to understand the situation that expert engineers encounter in their daily project work! I very much enjoyed the process of research and discovery. I learned a lot during these four months, included myself. I am also very grateful to Mario, he is a dedicated hard worker with the ability to combine different abstract concepts and think them through. It was definitely a good partnership and I sincerely hope that we have more opportunities to work together in the future.

Next on the agenda is June 12th: Linköping University's Farewell Ceremony AND the SMIO Diploma Ceremony. A busy day, which I am really looking forward to!

Knowledge Integration under Uncertainty: A Sensemaking Perspective on Experts' Verbal Communication is available for download on DiVA.

Master Thesis (5)

Week end? What's that!?

The last 3 weeks have been insane. Every damn day was spent in a library room (think: cold and without window) to significantly boost our thesis from the feedback received during the Pre-Final seminar. Now, we submitted our final version a few days ago and we are satisfied with it! You cannot imagine the mix feelings of proudness and relieve when we eventually have the printed version in hands. 

Giving birth after 4 months of hard labor, it's called: Knowledge Integration under Uncertainty.

Our study takes a sensemaking perspective on how do expert engineers communicate within a New Product Development (NPD) project team when they integrate their individual knowledge and overcome the environmental uncertainty—which should paralyze the team instead.

Through the belief-driven process of Karl Weick's sensemaking concept, we analyze the verbal communication during a meeting of experts from a NPD project aiming to design a new steam turbine.

The meeting's structure was the following: informing each other, discussing and planning. Taking a deeper look at how do the experts discuss, we identify punctuated forms of expectations and frequent arguments.

Eventually, arguing itself is characterized by elements of questioning, rewording and summarizing. Hence, we see arguing as a facilitator of knowledge integration under uncertainty.

What's next?

The next step is the thesis defense, publicly taking place on June 3rd-5th at Linköping University (1h15 for each thesis). Next to their own defense, each pair of authors is required to make an opposition on one other thesis and actively participate in four other thesis defenses.

Afterwards (and only then), we all will be able to enjoy the great spring weather in Linköping!

Master Thesis (4)

As I said previously, the previous weeks have been really dedicated to the master thesis. For a 'Pre-Final seminar', our supervisor, Marie Bengtsson, asked to provide her with a complete version of our thesis by April 30th. To describe what she expects, she uses the metaphor of a Swiss cheese: our thesis can have holes and parts missing but it has a form and be held together.

Indeed, we managed to write the missing parts, namely the analysis and the conclusion, before the deadline. Although it was a bit sloppy and we knew it was not perfect, we felt pretty good once we uploaded our thesis draft. This version was supposed to serve as the basis for a first evaluation regarding whether we would be able to present our final master thesis in June. If we are too far behind or the quality is not sufficient, we would have to present in August.

Hopefully, Mario and I managed to hand in a complete thesis, even if it was of a lower quality. Indeed, most of the other groups did not manage to finish in time and are wondering if they'd ever manage to finish before May 27th, the final deadline!

The 'Pie-throwing' seminar was held a few days later, leaving time for each group to read at least 2 theses and give a detailed feedback on one of them. That's how I could combine working / hosting friends for a few days, playing with Swedish red days (Valborg/King's Birthday and Första Maj) and the week-ends. 
Anyway, Mario and I really appreciated the comments from our colleagues. It gave us guidelines to go forward and make our draft better! However, since the seminar, we feel really frustrated as we basically spent half a week trying to go deeper in our analysis. The preliminary step was to reformulate our research question, which made us reconsider various theories and rewrite our methodology and empirical chapters. In short, we lost confidence in our work for a moment.

Receiving feedback is helpful and devastating. Of course, there is no point in receiving only positive feedback as we have 3 weeks left before the final hand-in. Yet, there are some comments that we would have preferred to receive earlier as we could have tackled our issues directly!

In other words, we are going through a really stressful period. I find it really hard to lock ourselves in study rooms on a 8.00-18.00 shift everyday, when the sun is shining hard outside and the thermometer exceeds the 20°C!!! But I rather remind myself: why give-up now? After 4 months, there are only 3 weeks left :)

Master Thesis (3)

I know, I know: time flies. It's been a month since my last thesis update and again, a lot has changed. For better or worse? I believe that it will turn out better!

Free time? Playing around with the SMIO program's logo...

Initially, we intended to study the automotive industry. More precisely, they hybrid bus: it is a really complex and innovative product, targeting a niche market and making use of very new technologies...it sounded like the perfect product to focus on regarding our project: 

KNOWLEDGE INTEGRATION IN TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY

After promising contacts in Germany, we had to give up our intentions. Indeed, we have a deadline by the end of April, so we had to collect data as early as possible...and this organization was taking its time and it did not seem like we were going to interview them before 2014!

Right...

As a matter of fact, we are now most likely to use secondary data (a raw transcript of a meeting) from another industry: electrical powerplants. More specifically, an organization is developing a new steam turbine. So we stay into complicated engineering stuff :) Obviously, our chapter I (intro) and chapter II (methodology) had to be changed for the most of it...and we go on with chapter IV (empirics) and chapter V (analysis)! Quite challenging!

Since a few weeks, we know the official deadlines

- to hand-in the final version of the thesis: May 27th;

- the seminars will take place for 3 days from: June 3rd;

- the Farewell Ceremony (graduation day) will be on: June 12th.

...and then I'll sleep for a month!

More seriously, I look forward another break into our schedule (8.00 - 17.30 daily). Easter was too short! Hopefully, I have some friends coming soon and then my parents will come for a week in june before mid-summer. I guess it will be weird to not 'have to work' after these intense weeks...I gotta find something else to do by then!

Master Thesis (2)

I thought it was about time to give an update on thesis work. Hopefully, 6 weeks later, we made a bunch of changes. Indeed, we invested a lot of time and energy in the reading-thinking-writing process. Intense days followed each other. Damn, mid-March already! Time flies.

Basically, I like working on the thesis. It feels like we're achieving something. When we printed a draft of our first chapters, it was satisfied to hold the light 20-pages document with MASTER THESIS on the cover. In a way, I'm looking forward to be done :) 

Work in progress.

Whatever we read, books, articles, dissertations or thesis; it somehow influences us in our further work. We build upon existing concepts. Although, we shouldn't forget that it is just a master thesis: no need to establish a new theory, concept or model and compete to be the 21st century's Einstein! Yet, it's more motivating to pursue something that hasn't been established already. Taken from another perspective, what we're doing now should be useful for future research or inspire other students. However, that won't be possible if our work is confidential and forbidden to be published by a firm. Indeed, that's one of our current problem.

Contribution-wise, we intend to add-up to the concept of Knowledge Integration in uncertain environments. Innovative firms developing new complex products have to deal with new technologies which are not even existing yet or not ready to commercialize and their potential customers have specific requirements due to the niche market which is targeted. Hence, we will study how knowledge is integrated from different individuals working together in a team in this context of uncertainty.

Library worm.

We have been reading a lot of materials. For me it's quite frustrating, because when it comes to writing down my thoughts, I want to talk about everything I learned. The difficulty is to be precise when we use established concepts, without forgetting opposite perspectives. In the pursuit of the perfect text, we spend a considerable amount of time playing around with words and rewriting complete paragraphs every second day!

On the bottom line, it is kinda the same with the methodology chapter. What you intended to do is different from what you're doing or what you'll be able to do! As a result, it is rather challenging to get it done... Anyway, I'm confident. All this hard work gotta pay off at some point :)

Master Thesis (1)

Still unpacking the car, the master thesis reality caught me back. It's about time to speed up!

My thesis partner is Mario K., my German study mate since the beginning of the program. We know well each other, as well as our thesis supervisor, Marie Bengtsson, as she taught us Leadership & Organization and Strategic Human Resource Management. Precisely, we intend to study knowledge integration in innovative firms from the city bus industry, developing diesel-electric hybrid powertrain solutions.

Today, we had a poster presentation with all SMIO generations. The 19 thesis groups of SMIO'12 presenting their projects (the more detailed and extended presentation, the more feedback/recommendations received to improve) and the SMIO'13 poped by to ask us questions, as we did last year with the SMIO'11.

It was nice to finally see what everybody has been working on over the last month, and how far it actually got them. Mario and me received constructive feedback that'll help us narrow down our project from the two possible topics we had in mind: 

1. "Knowledge integration in the light of the exploration/exploitation dilemma in innovative firms".
2. "Knowledge integration to build sustained competitive advantage in innovative firms".

We aim to design a case study with triangulation methods: semi-structured interviews with managers and engineers from an innovative organization, a semi-structured interview with an industry expert and secondary-data analysis of corporate materials and press releases from inside/outside the organization.

That's it for now!

ERASMUS - the bitter end

Atomium, Brussels.

BLOCUS

The Belgian exam period, so-called blocus, is now over (at least for me). It's been difficult to study all my courses together. I felt my head was a big pot where I threw in all different kinda theoretical concepts. The thing is, I ended up with a big mixed soup!

Most of my exams were multiple-choice-questions, based on books, often written by the class professors themselves. Of course, it was highly specific. But they made it even harder! For instance, I was asked to choose the right statement among four propositions and to justify my choice for each statement. Quite confusing!




All in all, it's been a quite stressful period. I'm glad it's over! Obviously, I "enjoy" more the Swedish examination system: one course at a time. The exams themselves are harder (open questions and discussions) but there is less confusion. At least my schedule was clearer! Anyway, my exchange semester as an Erasmus student ended with my last exam.

UGENT

Among the six Belgian universities ranked in the Times Higher Education World University Ranking, I spent my semester at Universiteit Gent (World rank: 93rd). 

Course code   -   Course name                                      -   ECTS credits

I was following 6 courses: Marketing Communication, Managing Service Organizations, Innovation & Technology Management, Financing High-Tech Entrepreneurial companies and Business-to-Business Marketing at the UGent and Strategic Human Resource Management at HogeSchool Gent.

If everything goes smoothly, I'll collect 32 ects credits which will be integrated in my master program at Linköping University (thanks to my Learning Agreement). Additionally, I had a Dutch class (4 ects credits) at UCT, but that was just "for fun"!

But all these data don't say much about my proper experience. Overall, I liked my exchange! Even though I've already studied some concepts before, the courses' content was interesting and for some, stimulating. However, I had trouble with Dutch. Meaning, a lack of English translation. Finding information on their online platform (Minerva) or from their emails was rather messy! During an exam, the teacher even gave the instructions in Dutch. No English! 

More critics? I found the professors inaccessible (I had two appointments with a teacher who didn't show up! On the third one, he was busy on the phone for 20mn. I gave up.); I missed feedback from them: 3 months after an assignment, still no grades (counting for 40% of the final grade); and I found bizarre that most of them ask the students to buy their own published books (e.g. I'd have to pay 70€ for a book!).

Nevertheless, I had the chance to meet great people outside the classrooms. That's what matters!

MASTER THESIS

Game on! While I was studying for my exams at UGent, my SMIO classmates at Linköping University were attending the introductory seminars on the Master Thesis, since January 21st. The thesis kick-off is based on a book: Tricks of the Trade - how to think about your research while you're doing it (H.S. Becker, 1998) which gives us lots of examples about what to (not) write and most importantly, through the author's experience in social sciences.

The fourth and last semester of my SMIO program is fully dedicated to the master thesis. In pair of two students, we have to hand in our pre-final version by the end of April, and the final version by the end of May. Each group has a supervisor to provide some guidelines along the process. Our 50-70 pages document will then be evaluated on its problem consideration, structure and logic, theoretical support, frame of reference, research method, empirical data report, analysis, and conclusions. We'll also have to defend our final thesis in public seminars upon the final version.

Waffle bus, Brussels.

The last month has been quite overwhelming with exams and thesis work. Although I loved Belgium with the beers, the chocolate, the fries and the waffles. But, to live in Brussels, you gotta like grey. Then it's perfect for you. So many different nuances of grey that you'll never be bored. But I was!

I'm looking forward being back in Linköping, Sweden. I missed mother Nature, the coziness of the city center and the university facilities. I'll enjoy my final semester at LiU! I'll keep you updated under the thesis writing process ;)

Now, it's time to pack. It's a few hours drive to get to the ferry bringing us back to Sweden...



Tot ziens België!