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Nowadays, the area of customer management strives for omni-channel and state-of-the-art CRM concepts including Artificial Intelligence and the approach of Customer Experience. As a result, modern CRM solutions are essential tools for supporting customer processes in Marketing, Sales and Service. AI-driven CRM accelerates sales cycles, improves lead generation and qualification, and enables highly personalized marketing. The focus of this thesis is to present the basics of Customer Relationship Management, to show the latest Gartner insights about CRM and CX, and to demonstrate an AI Business Framework, which introduces AI use cases that are used as a basis for the expert interviews conducted in an international B2B company. AI will transform CX through a better understanding of customer behavior. The following research questions are answered in this thesis: In which AI use cases can Sales and CRM be improved? How can Customer Experience be improved with AI-driven CRM?
Companies develop and implement strategies with the aim to address the needs of their customers. Acquisition is one market expansion strategy that companies can use to acquire new market access, technologies and/or to grow organically. In recent years, Chinese companies have been active in acquiring companies all over the globe to develop their strategic position. This caused certain contra reaction in Europe and as well in the Swiss media against cross-border acquisitions of Swiss companies.
Swiss companies and particularly the Swiss-MEM (Machinery, Electrical and Mechanical) industry is highly export oriented and their value proposition builds on attributes like knowledge, technology, and differentiating products. Among them are many “hidden champions” and niche players who successfully dominate the market segment.
As observed with Chinese companies, Indian companies also started to become more active outside of their domestic markets by increasing their foreign direct investments into Europe, Asia and North America, over the last decades. The lasting and good relationship of India and Switzerland might trigger the wish for Indian companies to acquire Swiss and particularly Swiss-MEM companies for acquisitions.
This Master’s Thesis assesses how often Indian investments into public and privately owned Swiss-MEM companies by acquisition happen, how are the attempts of acquisitions perceived by the stakeholders and what measures Swiss and Swiss-MEM companies can take, to protect themselves from being acquired. To access the research topic, several sub-questions will be analysed with the aid of primary and secondary research to assess the situation.
The research topic is of particular interested to the author since he spent over 20 years working in the Swiss-MEM industry, involved in international affairs and in recent years specifically with India. The observation of Chinese acquisition activities and insight into the size and potential of India were the drivers for researching whether India might follow China’s example.
In conclusion, Indian companies are not explicitly targeting Swiss and Swiss-MEM companies, but there are reasons to believe that it would make sense for Indian companies to look into the acquisition of Swiss and Swiss-MEM companies. The perception of such acquisitions varies, but there are arguments for and against them. Companies must take strategic and organisational measures in order to prevent themselves from becoming the target of an acquisition. However, it is known that the state should not interfere in the market and a discussion at a political level, planning how to deal with cross-border acquisition, is needed.
Further areas for research based on this Master’s Thesis could be the review of how the targeting of Swiss and Swiss-MEM companies by Indian companies would look, and also the topic of the succession planning in Swiss secondary sector in conjunction with Indian targeting for acquisitions. A third area to research might be investigating the political aspects involved in the research questions.
The boom of information technology development created high demand for skilled labour force in IT occupations. IT professionals install, test, build, repair or maintain hardware and software and can do the job from any location in the world.
Demand for the workforce significantly outstrips the global supply. In a situation of staff shortage employers have to compete on local and global labour markets. The ability of a firm to attract and retain the best talent would become a source of its sustainable competitive advantage.
Aim of the study is to understand what influences perception of employment attractiveness by IT professionals the most. This study intends to expend the existing knowledge about employees´ needs and “psychological contract” concept.
The research was conducted with the participation of 4 IT and 4 HR English-speaking experts who live and work in Austria. In the study the grounded theory approach and the descriptive qualitative methods were applied.
The research findings explain which factors influence the decision of IT professionals to join, stay or leave an employer. The results are discussed in relation to talent attraction and retention practices of Austrian employers.
In recent years, much research has been done on medical laser applications inside the human body, as they are minimally invasive and therefore have fewer side effects and are less expensive than conventional therapies. In order to bring the laser light into the human body, a glass fibre with a diffuser is needed. The goal of this master thesis is the characterization and production of fibre optic diffusers that can be used for the three therapeutic applications: photodynamic therapy, laser-induced thermotherapy and endovenous laser therapy. For this purpose the following goals have to be achieved:
- Optimization of the efficiency and homogeneity of internally structured diffusers
- Examine damage thresholds of the diffusers in the tissue using a crash test
- Achieving a better understanding of the decouple mechanism with a simulation
Using an ultra-short pulse laser, modifications could be introduced into the fibre in this way that the radiation profile is homogeneous and the decoupling efficiency is 68.3 %. It was discovered that the radiation profile depends on the wavelength. Attempts have been made to improve the decoupling efficiency by mirroring the distal end of the fibre. The mirror reflects the remaining light back into the fibre, so that it is also decoupled lateral on the modifications. Vapor-deposited aluminum with physical vapor deposition is a promising approach. However, the adhesion of the coating must be improved or the coating must be protected by a mechanical cover, otherwise it will flake off too quickly.
In a crash test, it was shown that the glass fibre diffusers can withstand 20 W laser power for 300 s without visible change. In an ex vivo test, the coagulation zone in the tissue was examined and it was showed that the diffusers radiate radially homogeneously. Using a ray trace simulation, the course of the light rays in the fibre was examined and the correlation of modification width and length with the decoupling efficiency was investigated. It was discovered that there are helical light rays in the fibre, which cannot be decoupled by modifications in the fibre centre.
Gas hydrates are usually synthesized by bringing together a pressurized gas and liquid or solid water. In both cases, the transport of gas or water to the hydrate growth site is hindered once an initial film of hydrate has grown at the water–gas interface. A seemingly forgotten gas-phase technique overcomes this problem by slowly depositing water vapor on a cold surface in the presence of the pressurized guest gas. Despite being used for the synthesis of low-formation-pressure hydrates, it has not yet been tested for hydrates of CO 2 and CH 4 . Moreover, the potential of the technique for the study of hydrate decomposition has not been recognized yet. We employ two advanced implementations of the condensation technique to form hydrates of CO 2 and CH 4 and demonstrate the applicability of the process for the study of hydrate decomposition and the phenomenon of self-preservation. Our results show that CO 2 and CH 4 hydrate samples deposited on graphite at 261–265 K are almost pure hydrates with an ice fraction of less than 8%. Rapid depressurization experiments with thin deposits (approx. 330 mm thickness) of CO 2 hydrate on an aluminum surface at 265 K yield identical dissociation curves when the deposition is done at identical pressure. However, hydrates deposited at 1 MPa almost completely withstand decomposition after rapid depressurization to 0.1 MPa, while samples deposited at 2 MPa decompose 7 times faster. Therefore, this synthesis technique is not only applicable for the study of hydrate decomposition but can also be used for the controlled deposition of a super-preserved hydrate.
Complementarities and synergies of quadruple helix innovation design in smart city development
(2020)
Increased urbanization trends are stimulating regional needs to support transitions from urban environments to smart cities, using its holistic perspective as a source to innovation. Strong relations between smart cities, urban and regional development, are getting increased attention both at policy and implementation level, providing fertile ground for execution of the new European policy frameworks that supports quadruple helix approaches to innovation. Smart specialization strategies (RIS3) encompass such initiatives, placing ICT and collaboration between academia, industry, government, and citizen at the center of urban innovation. However, there is still lack of research on effects of such approaches to innovation, involving both quadruple helix clusters and ICT in utilizing innovation potentials for developing smart cities. This study aims to increase the understanding on how quadruple helix urban innovation strengthens competitiveness of regions by improving its local smart areas – RIS3. We identified smart specialization patterns and applied comparative benchmark between nine smallmedium sized urban regions in Central Europe. Building on these results, the study provides an overview of the effects of RIS3 strategies implemented through quadruple helix innovation clusters on competitiveness of regions and Smart City development.
This master thesis investigates a Computational Intelligence-based method for solving PDEs. The proposed strategy formulates the residual of a PDE as a fitness function. The solution is approximated by a finite sum of Gauss kernels. An appropriate optimisation technique, in this case JADE, is deployed that searches for the best fitting parameters for these kernels. This field is fairly young, a comprehensive literature research reveals several past papers that investigate similar techniques.
To evaluate the performance of the solver, a comprehensive testbed is defined. It consists of 11 different Poisson equations. The solving time, the memory consumption and the approximation quality are compared to the state of the art open-source Finite Element solver NGSolve. The first experiment tests a serial JADE. The results are not as good as comparable work in the literature. Further, a strange behaviour is observed, where the fitness and the quality do not match. The second experiment implements a parallel JADE, which allows to make use of parallel hardware. This significantly speeds up the solving time. The third experiment implements a parallel JADE with adaptive kernels. It starts with one kernel and introduce more kernels along the solving process. A significant improvement is observed on one PDE, that is purposely built to be solvable. On all other testbed PDEs the quality-difference is not conclusive. The last experiment investigates the discrepancy between the fitness and the quality. Therefore, a new kernel is defined. This kernel inherits all features of the Gauss kernel and extends it with a sine function. As a result, the observed inconsistency between fitness and quality is mitigated.
The thesis closes with a proposal for further investigations. The concepts here should be reconsidered by using better performing optimisation algorithms from the literature, like CMA-ES. Beyond that, an adaptive scheme for the collocation points could be tested. Finally, the fitness function should be further examined.
Many test drives are carried out in the automotive environment. During these test drives many signals are recorded. The task of the test engineers is to find certain patterns (e.g. an emergency stop) in these long time series. Finding these interesting patterns is currently done with rule based processing. This procedure is very time consuming and requires a test engineer with expertise. In this thesis it is examined if the emerging field of machine learning can be used to support the engineers in this task. Active Learning, a subarea of machine learning, is used to train a classifier during the labeling process. Thereby it proposes similar windows to the already labeled ones. This saves the annotator time for searching or formulating rules for the problem. A data generator is worked out to replace the missing labeled data for tests. The custom performance measure “proportion of seen samples” is developed to make the success measurable. A modular software architecture is designed. With that, several combinations of Time Series Classification algorithms and query strategies are compared on artificial data. The results are verified on real datasets, which are open source available. The best performing, but computational intensive solution is an adapted RandOm Convolutional KErnel Transform (ROCKET). The custom query strategy “certainty sampling” shows the best results for highly imbalanced datasets.
Cultural Due Diligence
(2020)
Much research has been conducted in recent years to discover the reasons for the high failure rate of M&As, whereas one frequently cited reason is the incompatibility of the corporate cultures. In order to minimize this risk and to be able to react to these differences already at an early stage, Cultural Due Diligence offers itself as part of the due diligence process. Unlike existing, more general research, I emphasize the cultural challenges companies face when investing transnationally with this thesis. Using the results of a single case study with inductive character, I answer the question how to conduct Cultural Due Diligence in cross-border M&As and propose an appropriate model. The findings reveal that especially in cross-border M&As, cultural incompatibility poses a risk for failure. I was able to find out that companies that seek to grow internationally with M&As deal with similar issues in terms of corporate culture as pointed out in existing Cultural Due Diligence methods. The present study, however, shows that national culture has a great influence on corporate culture, which is why it is essential to include it in the cultural assessment in cross-border acquisitions. This provides information about why there are differences, besides the fact that they exist. Only this understanding puts a company in the appropriate starting position to recognize differences, understand them, assess whether these differ-ences are acceptable, as well as to develop appropriate strategies to address them in the integration phase.