Final throes.

Submission is four days' time! How time flies.

Alliz and I have been crunching in the hours in furiously editing our thesis for length and for grammar, consistency etc. We managed to cut down the number of pages for the main part of the report, so that is a relief. We've now sent the latest draft to Leif, and are hoping to receive his comments in time for us to make any necessary changes before submission this Sat.

It's been such an intense but inspiring journey, and Alliz and I feel almost like proud parents :) Now, let's hope others feel the same about our 'baby'...

Time to rack those brains.

The meeting with Leif last Friday was extremely fruitful, and we appreciated the insightful comments he has appended into our thesis draft as it stood. And so since then, Alliz and I have been working hard to incorporate all that we've worked on into one draft -

And as of today, the thesis stands at 100 pages.

Which I think may be a bit much for the reader to sift through. With only 15 days left before the thesis submission, I'm feeling the crunch because it feels like there is still much to be done, with a key part left - Conceptualising and summarising our key findings from all the information we've garnered and processed, into something original and useful and of real contribution to the field.

It does feel that we are almost there, but now it's really an application of the mind. And it is timely that Leif has strongly encouraged us to look into Jay Forrester's World Dynamics, which speaks of translating mental models into computer models, which can better capture the effects of all assumptions on the variables in question in a systematic and logical way.

We are reading the book now, and will be meeting tomorrow to work through what our key findings are, as well as our own proposed systems dynamic model based on the innovation system models that we are analysing.

As for the sheer bulk of pages - perhaps we can append more? Leif proposes a guideline of having the main report be 60+ pages... which is looking to be approximately half of our report if including the final conclusion section.

Looking for inspiration now more than ever!

Structural change.

I applaud the person who came up with the idea of having a midterm seminar for theses. It's the perfect checkpoint to evaluate with fresh eyes whether the thesis is in the right track, because it can get so easy for the authors to be blindsided by their own work!

Hearteningly enough, we received good reviews from our opponents on our subject matter and content of our work. It was interesting, timely, thought-provoking, and the main suggestions for improvement were structural - realigning the content to fit the Swedish framework of thesis writing. Since both Alliz & I have never written a thesis before, let alone a Swedish one, we were very grateful for the tips and ideas put for by our opponents.

Perhaps one key challenge for us is to somehow create a flow in the thesis, such that the reader can easily navigate through the data. Much like navigating the knowledge landscape, albeit transformed into a more linear framework which the reader can follow. How to effectively create linearity in such a dynamic topic where all areas inter-relate, is another question, which we can hope we can find the answers too. It would be a pity if the main points of the thesis are lost in too much content!

Since the midterm thesis seminar on 27 Apr, Alliz & I have been working separately on our writeups for Singapore and Malaysia (similar to what we have done for Finland). Today is the day we begin pulling all three case studies together, and it would be interesting to see how it can and will all fall into place.

Just sent Leif our latest thesis draft too (which has not yet incorporated the structural changes and Singapore/Malaysia writeups). Looking forward to hearing his comments during our review session tomorrow!