This is my last re[p]ort

 Dear all,

I hope you all had a good summer and are ready to start the new semester with fresh energy!

These past months have been a lot. I had many ups and downs in many ways with the field study beening more challenging than I anticipated. However, I am slowly coming to an end; one final push and I am hopefully done and happy with my results.

One of the biggest struggles for me has been to simply sit down and focus on the research with everything happening around me. With my mind being all over the place, the research kind of went a bit the same and got lost. I ended up researching too broad, losing the focus and having too much information and no real structure. Nevertheless, I am on the right track now: restructuring, refocusing and restricting the research.

I am finally done with the findings and am now moving on to the conclusion and discussion for which I already have brief structure, ideas and notes.

Finishing off with what I do best, a song reference. Papa Roach: This is my last resort. This song summarises the path of this field study in its own (slightly overdramatic ;)) words.

Stay safe and take care of yourself and the ones you love.

See you soon with fresh energy and drive to learn!

/Laura 

Part III: Research assistance in scalability strategies used by the fashion industry to increase CBM activities

Dear all,

this is my final blog entry, and I can tell you that this field study has been a rollercoaster! One moment I was really satisfied with all the theoretical background I researched, the next I doubted its relevance for the whole case. In the end I had to cut down the word count by two thirds, which hurt a lot due to all that time and effort of establishing an informative background for the reader.
However, I admit that I lost the research question out of sight and included a lot of interesting but not as relevant facts. Also, I focused too much on the establishment of the mapping framework, which solely had the function to exemplify scalability strategies used by the industry.

However, this process also pointed out that the developed Scalability Matrix Model by Hultberg et al. is only applicable on a general level rather than showing off a road map of actions towards increased circular business model (CBM) scalability. In general, my findings of what the industry is currently pursuing to increase CBMs is performed with the aim towards efficiency, rather than adaptability. Also, collaboration seems to be preferred in uncertain fields, whereas "safe" practices are carried out individually.

Enjoy the rest of the summer – and see you soon! :-)

Melanie

Research Assitant Internship with the Handelslabbet, Blogpost #3

 Hej alla,

It’s been a hot second since you’ve read from me last but now I am back to give you my final update of the field study experience.

The last time you’ve heard from me, I have been struggling with a serious case of FOMOA (fear of missing out on an article) and have been tasked with the creation of my own research model and experimental guideline.
Going from there, I focussed on analyzing the research models and experimental guidelines of articles I read, filtered out the hypothesized relationships, and evaluated which connections were proven to be correlated and which weren't.
As I am a very visual person, it helped me a lot to actually draw onto those models (via Adobe Illustrator) and visually map out my thought process. Like this, I was able to see which hypotheses were proven, which scholars managed to prove similar relationships and which connections were proven to not exist or influence each other in a reversed way. Additionally, I was able to see, which connections weren’t hypothesized within this group of articles I evaluated. Furthermore, how trust is incorporated within the observed research models is done in a variety of ways. Seeing this, helped me to formulate and design my own research model by thinking about the connections that I am curious about, and that would help e-tailers gain insights into the cognitive and emotional processes influencing a customer's decision to purchase. I sketched out my research model on paper and then transferred it to adobe illustrator to be able to move around and test out different ideas.
Together with Jenny Balkow and her research team from the Handelslabbet, the research model was discussed and further refined. I was tasked to narrow it down and think about ways to operationalize my hypothesized connections within an experiment with the digital showroom. Our final meeting involved me presenting my idea and thought process and us further refining the model. This was the final product of my research assistant internship and could be tested within an experiment on a later stage.
To conclude, I can definitely say that this experience taught me a lot and gave me a new perspective on the work of a researcher within social sciences. I learned, that, even though no paint, fabric, or other material is involved, the work of researching is still a very creative process that requires curiosity, thinking out of the box, and analytical skills. It is safe to say that this time opened up a new perspective and sparked an interest in research in me.

So, if you are wondering whether a research assistant internship would be the right thing for you, I can tell you don’t be afraid to dive into it and try researching out even when coming from a practical background. You’ll learn a lot and gain a new understanding of academia and social sciences.

Literature Review: Risk Management strategies and practices to cope with risks in the Textile Supply Chain

Hey fellow students! 

I hope you had a great summer, even though the weather (in Europe) did not show its best side .. 

 

It’s time for the third and last blog entry about my attempt to conduct a systematic literature review. Since the last time, I finished summarizing the risks prevalent in the Textile Supply Chain and started to summarize my findings from the literature search in order to analyze them. The 3^rd phase included issues like what type of information I need to be abstracted to fulfill the purpose of my review. Since I aimed to find strategies to cope with risks specifically prevalent to the Textile Supply Chain, I sorted the literature I found regarding the risk types to see if certain risks allow specific strategy or practices. 

Moreover, it was important to determine which type of information I need to conduct my analysis. Since I aimed to additionally investigate trends in Risk Management strategies in the era of digitalization, not only the findings of each study were important for my analysis, but also the publication dates and research methods. Nevertheless, the difficult part of the 3^rd phase is to see specific patterns or irregularities in the literature to abstract findings. Luckily, Excel is a helpful tool. 

 

Finally, I could start with the 4^th phase, structuring and writing the review. I started off with clarifying the purpose and motivation of my review. Afterwards, it is important to document and report my research process as detailed as possible to ensure replicability. The level of information provided needs to be appropriate in order to allow for transparency, so that the reader can easily judge the quality of my literature review. However, I am aware that my review is highly biased since I searched, summarized, categorized and analyzed all the data myself. 

Next, I am going to present and explain my findings, hopefully in a clear and structured way, so that my review makes a contribution to the literature.

 

I do not regret the choice to conduct a literature review during the field study, especially since the topic I choose seems relevant and up to date. However, looking back I recommend to not work by yourself on a literature review, because a second opinion on certain issues is very valuable. I had several times when I got stuck in my thinking and conclusions and even though I asked friends for advice, they could not help me since they did not have the same level of knowledge about the topic as I did. This definitely prolonged the process. 

 

I hope you all had a good experience during your field study!

See you soon!

 

Best,

Michaela

Part II: Research assistance in scalability strategies used by the fashion industry to increase CBM activities

Dear all,

in my previous blog I described the task and the problematic process of establishing a mapping framework to detect the strategies used by companies to upscale circular business models (CBMs). Having read multiple sources on circularity and encompassing business models, I have come to the conclusion that it is not possible for me to map generalised strategies for upscaling CBMs, as literature suggests different approaches to facilitate different reverse cycles of otherwise linear processes. 

Hence, I have decided to cluster CBMs according to literature into six approaches towards circularity. Here, the most common CBMs support recycling and reuse, but also repair and remanufacturing are being employed by the industry; less heard of is repurposing and organic feedstock extraction. Within these six clusters, I aim to filter sustainability reports according to CBM enablers and suggested strategies by the Scalability Matrix Model of Hultberg et al. (2020). However, I find it difficult to directly pin point a certain strategy being used, as reports merely describe activities taken by companies. In my opinion, a sequence of activities can follow a certain strategy. As different CBMs ask for different strategies, my first step of mapping is to sort found activities in these CBM clusters and detect an orientation, which then in turn suggests the strategy being followed. 

Thus, I first need to determine which activities companies are undertaking to increase the scalability of CBMs, and only thereafter I can make sense of the strategy in use. 

My biggest struggle is to filter relevant information only, as a lot and very interesting information is provided by companies and I learn about projects and collaborations in the field of sustainability. It is quite fascinating, but also frustrating as I continuously come across green-washing and contradicting statements...

I wish you all the best for your studies – but also do not forget to enjoy summer! :-)

Melanie

Blog 3/3: Field Study in progress

Dear All, 

I hope everyone is still safe and is enjoying summer! 

This is my last entry blog about my field study progress, and it is almost August. It has been two weeks already since I gave you an update on my field study and my working experience at Tchibo. 

In my previous blog entries, I focused more on my working experience however in this entry blog I want to give you a more detailed update in regard to my field study. In my field study I am conducting a benchmark analysis about the user interface flow of websites with the focus on the mobile checkout process. During my internship I was able to conduct the benchmark analysis very easily. Due to my membership of the “Mobile Checkout Process Team” I was able to get insides, impressions and important details to focus while conducting the benchmark analysis. A few insides I focused on were, the arrangement of the shopping cart, the article presentation and descriptions, the quantity of steps, the voucher box, the express checkout, the click and collect area, the variety of payment options and lastly sticky elements. Moreover, we concentrate on every kind of competitors however I want to concentrate on popular online fashion pure players like About You and Zalando, which also represents a high level of optimization in regard to their mobile checkout process. I was not only responsible for the benchmark analyses itself I also had to collect scrolled screenshots of every competitor. Moreover, I had to present the benchmark analysis to the board of the team. As I told you before we did a qualitative observation, where we scanned six participants while scrolling throughout our checkout process. After both parts of the project we were able to collect findings and establish hypotheses for the optimization of the mobile checkout process. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to give you more details on the qualitative observation, but this was actually nice to get a deeper understanding of customer behaviour and therefore the user interface flow of the Tchibo website. Coming to the part of finding the right literature I will be honest with you guys; it took me actually a while to conduct my literature review based on my strategy as well as to find the best fit for the table of content. and it still does. 

Concluding, I have almost all bits and pieces to actually write down my field study. In Germany you would say “Leichter gesagt als getan” meaning it is easy to say than doing it:D 

#staysafe 

Best, 

Jana

Work in Progress

Hi All,

almost August - time flies.

I hope you are all doing well and are healthy!

I’ll start with a quick reminder about my research topic: For the field study I am conducting a systematic literature review regarding Blockchain in textile and clothing supply chains. The aim of my research is to describe the status quo of Blockchain in this particular industry and to identify new research areas and questions.

Therefore, I have been busy reading and analysing the papers under review in the past few weeks and found some commonalities and repetitive themes across the literature. In general, however, it proved to be quite difficult to compare the different papers since they often only touch the field of textile and clothing supply chain and mainly revolve around a different topic, such as intellectual property law in the fashion industry. However, due to the lack of available sources, these articles were still taken into consideration for the analysis.

The themes that were identified as most important are supply chain transparency, traceability and visibility as well as data management in general, efficiency, ethicality in terms of environment, labour conditions and counterfeit. In the next step my aim is to map these themes to Blockchain capabilities and analyse to which degree the technology can help with these issues.

Wish me luck, wish you luck.

And see you all soon 😊!

Laura

Crisis Management Blogpost 2/3


Hi everyone,

Hope all are doing great and have escaped from this bloody virous so far.

During the past weeks I was sooo busy with finishing all my unfinished assignments of all courses for the two-year program as well as, I had an eye on articles on crisis management at the same time. I have read almost anything that exist, however, the problem is that the number of the relevant literature on crisis management is very little, as apparently people do not have tendency to even think of crisis. The interesting thing is that due to the spread of the Corona Virus, which caused a worldwide crisis, just two or three peer reviewed articles on crisis management have been published recently but unfortunately nothing about fashion industry yet.

 I have learnt a lot though, especially about SMEs which were my main concern. As I was obsessed with this topic, I found some interesting and new things in even everyday life, the most interesting part for me is that every single country in the world had/ have its own approach to this issue and almost none of them have exactly the same approach with its own societal/political reason behind their strategies.

Time flies and I hope to be done before the deadline.

I wish you all health and peace and hope all enjoy the summer.


Best

Kati

Blog 2/3: Update about my working experience at Tchibo and my field study progress

Dear all, 

I hope everyone is still healthy and is enjoying summer!

It has been two months already since I have started my internship at the SEO department of the company Tchibo in Germany. It is time for another update about my working experience as an intern and about my field study progress. 

First of all, I really enjoy working at the company. Although everyone is working from home, my team is trying to provide insights in every kind of way. I am actually very surprised how well everything is going however the pandemic had a huge impact on working surroundings. My portfolio of tasks has increased and therefore I am gaining so much practical knowledge. Most of the time I am responsible to track keyword analysis, update specific SEO information on the website as product text passages, meta-descriptions and related photo images and I am responsible to talk to our content agency about upcoming important topics. What I really enjoyed the last couple of weeks was, to get more creative tasks and more responsibility. I am now responsible to make suggestions for our SEO coffee related text passages. This includes to research about important and interesting information, telling a story to the customer and spreading emotions. Moreover, I am also getting more and more analytical tasks, which I really enjoy, trying to find the best solutions while analysing analytical data. I already mentioned before, that I am a member of a project team with the focus on the optimization of the check-out process of the company, which will be a part of my field study.

Working in the project team really supports me to get more ideas and impacts for my field study. I was responsible to conduct a benchmark analysis, focusing on seven different competitors including online fashion pure players like Zalando and AboutYou. Moreover, our project highlight was the event of the “UX BUS”. The event can be described as a qualitative observation. An observation team out of ten people, including myself were responsible to conduct findings while observing six participants who scrolled throughout our check-out process online, answering questions and giving feedback to the presenter. I find it very interesting to see the different actions of different participants and also to collect findings, which were already discussed beforehand. 

I get so many interesting insights however I am really struggling to conduct the right literature. I will provide you an more detailed update on that on my next blog entry. 

#staysafe

(3/3) Internship at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW)

My internship came officially to an end. I am very thankful for all the insights I got especially under those circumstances of a pandemic. During the last weeks, when being at the office, I realized that it makes such a huge difference to be physically present at an institute: communication ways are shorter, it is easier to get in contact with other employees and interns from other projects and working together at one place makes a truly interdisciplinary exchange possible. I am very thankful that I got the chance to experience office live even if it was only for a month. The last weeks of my internship had been very intense. I conducted ten interviews, sometimes three interviews per day, though it showed me that it was the right choice to undertake my field study in collaboration with a well-known and established institute. Enterprises were easier approachable, and the practical part of the project made it sometimes easier for my interview partners to answer my questions. Therefore, I could collect a rich material that has to be transcribed and analyzed during the upcoming weeks and I am excited to share the results not only during the final presentation but also with the Institute of Economic studies in August. I want to say thank you again, for giving me the opportunity to conduct my own research and the trust that was given to me from the institute. I want to emphasize that it is not self-evident to welcome, offline and online, interns in times of a pandemic. 

Next to my research the internship made me realize to focus more on the political dimension of sustainability. There is this tendency of enterprises complaining that there are not enough rules and regulations when it comes to sustainability although there are. I also missed out to study these regulations during my studies. There is a political framework in place but if managers do not know about it and therefore do not implement it, it remains meaningless. We must start to think about how to interpret the possibly upcoming Supply Chain Law and how to incorporate the European Action Plan for Circular Economy next to the European Packaging Directive into the corporate context. Laws and regulations must be translated into the reality of enterprises and should not remain on the paper.