Kari Liukkunen

University of Oulu · Department of Information Processing Science

Digital twin (DT) emerges as a key concept of the Industry 4.0 paradigm and beyond. However, the current literature lacks focus on humans and human activities as a part of complex system DTs. Acknowledging human aspects in DTs can enhance work performance, well-being, motivation and personal development of professionals. This study examines emergin...

In software engineering and other technology related teaching educators increasingly integrate de-facto online tools into coursework. However, the impact of using these tools is not clearly understood. To this end, this research project will provide a visual dashboard with extensive and stakeholder-specific visualizations to serve the diverse needs...

To better prepare the next generation of software professional, it is important to provide opportunities for them to work on real software project along with real customer during their studies. This is the reason universities around the world offer project-based capstone course. Such courses help students to understand what they will face in the in...

Context Software startups develop innovative products through which they scale their business rapidly, and thus, provide value to the economy, including job generation. However, most startups fail within two years of their launch because of a poor problem-solution fit and negligence of the learning process during minimum viable product (MVP) develo...

The contemporary world is a world of connections, codependencies, and value networks. However, finding suitable partners and key competences require considerable effort. The proposed business ecosystem creation platform provides 24/7 “available everywhere” web service, including digital infrastructure and tools for professional networking-agents, c...

Context: Successful startup firms have the ability to create jobs and contribute to economic welfare. A suitable ecosystem developed around startups is important to form and support these firms. In this regard, it is crucial to understand the startup ecosystem, particularly from researchers’ and practitioners’ perspectives. However, a systematic li...

Context: Software startups aim to develop innovative products, grow rapidly, and thus become important in the development of economy and jobs. Requirements engineering (RE) is a key process area in software development, but its effects on software startups are unclear. Objective: The main objective of this study was to explore how RE (elicitation,...

Background – Transforming a business opportunity to a valid business case is a crucial process of an early-stage software startups. Prior literature on entrepreneurship defines two types of opportunity exploitations, opportunity discovery and opportunity creation, and proposes models describing the exploitation processes. The factors affecting star...

Developing a technology push product that brings real novelty to the market is difficult, risky and costly. This case study analyzes success factors defined by the literature. True industrial cases, representing Finnish ICT firms in their early phase after a successful market entry, were researched for the success factor analysis. The whole set of...

Background – Resource-based-view and human capital theories have been used for decades when studying firms, their strategies, organizations, businesses, and successes. The value of the theories as general frameworks has commonly been recognized, especially because of their flexibility in adopting new perspectives, such as the dynamic character of t...

Although software startups are considered important for economic development due to their ability to quickly create cutting-edge technologies and their potential to scale to a wide market, contextual knowledge about the product idea development process of startups is poorly understood in the literature. This study explores the idea validation proce...

Scrumban combines two Agile approaches (Scrum and Kanban) to create a management framework for improving software engineering practices. Scrumban is expected to override both Scrum and Kanban, as it inherits the best features of both. However, there is little understanding of the possible impact of Scrumban on software development in prior studies....

[Context]: Communication plays an important role in any development process. However, communication overhead has been rarely compared among development processes. [Objective]: "e goal of this work is to compare the communication overhead and the different channels applied in three agile processes (XP, Scrum, Scrum with Kanban) and in an unstructure...

[Context]: Communication plays an important role in any development process. However, communication overhead has been rarely compared among development processes. [Objective]: "e goal of this work is to compare the communication overhead and the different channels applied in three agile processes (XP, Scrum, Scrum with Kanban) and in an unstructure...

Context: Eliciting requirements from customers is a complex task. In Agile processes, the customer talks directly with the development team and often reports requirements in an unstructured way. The requirements elicitation process is up to the developers, who split it into user stories by means of different techniques. Objective: We aim to compare...

Business ecosystems are a way of contextualizing the collaboration between organizations during the development of new business. Traditionally, business ecosystems are forming around one leader company, but they can also be formed with the support of public funding bringing together companies and research organizations to develop new technological...

Technology-based services are increasingly being developed in business ecosystems. Business ecosystems benefit companies by enabling shared goals and resources through collaboration, but a successful business ecosystem also requires internal management of knowledge. Strategic funding is currently being offered for the formation of new business ecos...

Context: To attain an advantage over competitors, small software companies (SSCs) need to have an efficient software development process. However, systematic review studies that have examined the software development process within the context of SSCs are limited. Objective: Therefore, the objective of this paper is to rigorously assess the current...

Entrepreneurs and Small and Medium Enterprises usually have issues on developing new prototypes, new ideas or testing new techniques. In order to help them, in the last years, academic Software Factories, a new concept of collaboration among universities and companies has been developed. Software Factories provide a unique environment for students...

Technology and software-based service development is increasingly important in business or innovation ecosystems. This paper describes an evolution of such an ecosystem as part of a four-year collaboration with several companies and a research organization. Research was conducted on the ecosystem's functions, from the perspective of managing its me...

Background—Until recently, mainstream research on software engineering targeted software development in established companies. However, startup companies have become more important in developing new software-intensive products and services. Consequently, research focusing on software startups has emerged. Understanding competence needs during the e...

This paper presents the formation of a Finnish SME wellness ecosystem during its first stages. The activities include setting a common vision of the ecosystem, its target state and challenges, as well as the joined service design possibilities. The ecosystem consists of SME companies that are looking to integrate their offer at the technology and s...

Industry needs graduates from universities having knowledge and skills to tackle the practical issues of real life software development. To facilitate software engineering students and fulfill industry need, the Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu, Finland, built a Software Factory laboratory (SWF) in 2012 based on Lean...

Today, micropayment systems usage is highly topical. For example, applications of mobile micropayment systems are widely used and are well known by the public. The objective of this study was to implement a micropayment system pilot based on an interoperability enabling platform (in this case, Smart-M3) for small businesses with restricted resource...

To be economically feasible, micropayment systems are expected to be efficient, with low transaction and computing costs and light security protection. In addition, a micropayment system is a networked good involving both consumers and merchants subject to positive network effects: the value of the system to consumers depends on the number of merch...

Modern technology is not used as broadly as it could be to support rehabilitation activities, especially physical exercise. The aim of this study was to ascertain how the use of information and communication technology (ICT) can create new possibilities to enhance vocationally oriented rehabilitation services. To achieve our goal, we conducted an e...

In the current globalized business environment, companies face increasing collaboration challenges at different levels of operation. Economic factors, as well as advancements in technology, have led to the globalization of design and production, which are organized into distributed projects. Information management and communication system issues ar...

There are both academic and industrial needs to explore more effective and motivating front-end innovation methods. Only a few studies have examined coopetition, innovation tournaments and design games as a model for the innovation process. The purpose of this paper is to present a design of a new method to improve the commonly utilized front-end i...

Insufficient knowledge and implementation barriers hinder the adaptation of e-learning in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Validated e-learning concepts can provide a roadmap to save company resources. The objective of this research was to study the transference of the e-learning concept developed in the university environment to an SME context...

In the global software development environment, the companies face the challenges of collaboration. This is particularly challenging for software companies in rural areas, which are typically small companies with limited resources. Often their customers and partners are also geographically dispersed. These factors, in addition to geographical dista...

The purpose of this paper is to improve the existing methods of building new product concepts in a qualitative "two-case" case study with action research approach combined with method comparison. Companies need an effective method to create radical product concepts and product visions. The commonly used focus group method is too simplistic for achi...

The goal of this paper is to study how software based virtual prototypes and hardware simulation tools can be combined. By combining these tools and techniques we can shorten the time to market with parallel concurrent design and more importantly, we can provide a real-time simulation environment for virtual prototypes. Application designers get ac...

During the period 2002–2004 Finnish universities developed and implemented their own strategies for the use of information and communication technologies in teaching as part of Finland's National Strategy for Education, Training and Research in the Information Society. Reports made on these strategies reveal that they were often rather weak on impl...

The benefit of computers in collaborative learning has been broadly researched, but it is still unknown what kind of possibilities the pedagogical use of mobile tools and wireless devices can bring to learning. In this paper we will present some results of two evaluation studies of students' conceptions of mobile devices in learning. The aim of the...

This article aims to describe the starting points emerging from user roles and needs that had to be taken into account in the design of an interactive Web portal to support learning targeted for secondary level students and teachers, and how they were carried into effect. The specification, design and implementation of the portal is made especially...