Bachelor and Master Theses

The EU Green Deal and its 2030 targets are reshaping the conditions for industrial companies, and the resulting requirements increasingly reach subcontractors through their customers. Large buyers set climate and circularity targets for their supply chains, request emissions and material data, and favour suppliers that can demonstrate progress. For subcontractors, the green transition is therefore becoming a condition for remaining competitive rather than an optional ambition.

In practice, subcontractors start from very different positions. Many are small and medium-sized firms with limited finance, skills, time and management attention, and they often face fragmented and sometimes inconsistent requirements from different customers. Few have a clear picture of where they stand today or what it would take to meet the 2030 targets. This makes it difficult for firms to prioritise, and for business-promotion actors in Västmanland to target support where it is most needed.

While the green transition of large manufacturers, and maturity and readiness models more generally, are widely discussed in the literature, there is limited academic work that explicitly addresses the green-transition readiness of subcontractors and how they can move from their current situation towards future targets.

The aim of this thesis is to map subcontractors’ green-transition readiness by identifying the challenges and opportunities they face, and to develop a readiness model that describes their current situation (as-is), the situation required to meet the 2030 targets (to-be) and the pathways between them.

·       RQ1: What factors shape and hinder subcontractors’ readiness to participate in the green transition?

·       RQ2: How can subcontractors bridge the gap between their current situation and the 2030 targets for the green transition?

Background in Industrial Engineering and Management, Product Development, Product and Process Development, Innovation Management, or Business Management. The student should be familiar with performance measurement and KPIs, digital services and industrial digitalization, and servitization or service-oriented business models. Basic understanding of ecosystems, digital platform constellation, and decision-support concepts is considered an advantage.

The thesis is part of Green Twin Leadership, an EU co-funded project led by Region Västmanland with Mälardalen University (https://regionvastmanland.se/utveckling/projektoversikt/green-twin-leadership/).
Access to companies involved in the Region’s Green-Transition activities will be arranged by the project team at a later stage of the thesis.