The MSc Thesis

The day arrived and last Monday I presented my master's thesis. It has been a long and tough way but now I'm happy with the result and with the stages that come along. Of course, I could do a better job if more time would have been available, but as mi adviser told me, it overtakes the standards of the task :-o . Nevertheless, this does not end here. Some opportunities have appeared now to apply the methodology and results to my day to day work and also positive perspectives arise on the academic field. A PhD? It is too early to know and I have promised my partner a period of relative rest.
Anyhow, and although this blog was started for the master, I hope to continue posting here the highlights (and down-lights) of my work, the random thoughts and the silly ideas that may appear in the future.

Mission (partly) accomplished!

The thesis work is more than fifty pages long and partly boring ;-) It is available here, and released under Creative Commons license, so if you enroll on having a look do it under your own responsibility, you are warned! Just kidding, any feedback is highly welcomed.

I post here the Abstract

The SIM card: An exercise of Technology Watch chasing state of the art and new opportunities.

The SIM card has become, thanks to its embedding in Mobile Handsets of GSM and other systems, the permanent companion of the subscriber and the more spread Smart Card of the world. In this work an exercise of TechnologyWatch has been done on the developments around the SIM Card along with a theoretical and literature review on the TW process. Technology Watch, and the broad concept of Competitive Intelligence, are introduced from a scholarlypoint of view and a review of literature on TW from the year 2003 to the present is done. This Theoretical Framework is then put on test with a Case Study about the SIM Card.
Using sources and data at three levels: Research, Development and Innovation and having in mind the corpus of the Technology Watch discipline, an analysis is done finding interesting knowledge, qualitative and quantitative, on the recent past and present development of the SIM card. This information is also used to do some prospect on the subject.
Some of the findings have been to identify the main publications at the research level, the Relevant International Patent Classifications and interesting sources for Market analysis for SIM Development. Moreover, a list of Institutions and Companies working in the subject is provided as well as the 2008 more published topics in the industry. The system and techniques used to do all this process are also described in detail.
This work is a start point in order to construct a system for continuous environmental scanning on SIM card developments as to detect weak signals and early trends to take advantage of them. Thus, it must be considered as a seminal work of a broader approach to Technology Watch in the SIM card business. It may be of interests of scholars, because the broad review on the literature, as well as practitioners, because the practical orientation of the Case Study, and managers of related industries because the information extracted from the data analysed.

UOC revisited

Some days ago I wrote about the UOC, this Open University that inspires me and leads me to get my MSc. in Knowledge and Information Society. I must say that I was totally wrong. What I interpreted from my tutor explanations and what he really meant had nothing to do. I thought as the university realized that a 12 week period for developing a MSc. Thesis work was to short time to do it when working full time and because that they gave us the opportunity to finish the thesis in a longer period without having to enroll again and pay the tuition fee.

I was wrong as I said. Not only I have to pay again the tuition fee but I have not been able to enroll and keep the access to the restricted contents of the library... really sad. Luckily I am member of the Old Students of the University of Barcelona, where I studied my degree in physics, and keep the access to the materials of this library.

So, after a year and a half of moderate satisfaction with the UOC, I am really disappointed because they bad way to manage this issue.