This report describes the results and outcomes of a Business Finland –funded TUTLI-project called ‘A cellulose-based collection method for rapid response offshore oil spill management (Project OILFILT)’. The work was carried out during January 2017 – December 2018 at the University of Oulu within the research groups of Fibre and Particle Engineering and Industrial Engineering and Management. The aim of project OILFILT was to seek commercialization possibilities for a novel technology of removing oil from water. Initially, the primary target for the use of the technology was offshore oil spill management, but during the project this use was found to be problematic. The primary market opportunity for the technology was found to be in oil-water separation within industrial sites, including cases within production processes, wastewater treatments and collection of oil from runoff areas and bodies of water. In pilot testing, a device utilizing OILFILT technology was able to collect hydraulic oil from water close to a rate of 150 g/h. The rate of oil collection could be scaled up by increasing the size of the device and further development of the technology.

Product development organisations are facing an increasing amount of rapid, small-scale development projects to fulfil market and customer needs. Self-managing teams have been proposed as effective means in creating new radical innovation, but their use has not been widely studied in smaller and faster product development projects, which are increasing in numbers. A multiple-case study was conducted to analyse seven business-to-business companies' product development models and the use of self-management in their rapid product development teams. The findings indicate that the companies use very similar characteristics of self-management to support rapid product development projects, but all characteristics of self-management do not support rapid product development teams. Notable success factors for rapid product development were dedicating competent developers for rapid projects, co-locating the development team, effective face-to-face communication and implementing a defined, but flexible workflow for rapid product development.

Occasionally, product development needs emerge suddenly through customer requests, by sales input or internally within a company. Then, there comes a sudden need to create new products more quickly than previously defined processes are designed for. Companies often seek to find different processes for projects of differing scope and complexity. There are many approaches to accelerating product development and reducing lead-time, but there is very little empirical research on how companies actually organize these faster development projects. A case study of eight companies was conducted with semi-structured interviews and focus groups to find out how they approach product development when they need to create product faster than what their new product development processes would allow. Results show that companies with a product-based offering have identified projects with different scope and complexity, but have not always defined how to approach them successfully. Companies with a project-based offering tend to approach all projects in a similar manner and do not make large changes to their processes based on project scope. The most used literature-based approaches that the case companies followed were: overlapping development stages, lead user involvement and emphasizing the customer.

Lean principles have been seen as a potential answer to the current issues of faster development cycles and more frequent releases, as software businesses are changing towards more service-oriented offerings and cloud-based business structures. Agile software development methods have played an important role in resolving the same issues at development level. This article creates a framework for lean software enterprise theory by linking lean theory, lean software development, and agile software development methods. The findings are tested through an empirical study conducted in two significant software engineering organizations. This article presents a conceptual lean software development system that clearly combines lean and agile. The important role of people and culture is also emphasized. Agile software development methods are characterized as the tools of lean software development and while lean software development is seen as a change beyond agile, agile approach is required for competitive advantage.

The main concern of the software industry is to deliver more products in shorter time-cycles to customers with an acceptable economic justification. In virtue of these concerns, the software industry and researchers in the field of software engineering have engaged in the process of adopting lean principles. In this paper, we are seeking the knowledge that could help us better understand the nature of flows in software development. We define a generalized concept of the value creation points and an axiomatic system that capture the specifics of software development. Further, a generalized definition of the flow makes it possible to identify super-classes of waste sources. Finally, we define a concept of decision flow, suggesting what a value creation point could be in the software development context. The decision flow is an inseparable part of the software development activities and it carries capabilities of adding or diminishing the value of products.