Master Thesis – From insight to impact: Refining the way R&D Laboratory and Analytics benchmark competitors

Essity – a leading global hygiene and health company and the home of brands like Libero, TENA, Libresse, Tork, Sorbact and JOBST is offering an exciting and challenging master thesis opportunity for you who want to contribute with your expertise, energy and creativity.

About The Job
Are you ready to apply your academic expertise to real business challenges? We're offering a master thesis project where you will play a key role in exploring and improving how we plan, execute, and present our competitive analyses. Your thesis will contribute significantly to how we understand stakeholder needs and shaping a more efficient and effective way of working-one that drives continuous improvement and fuels future innovation.

Your role

As a thesis student, you will play a key role in reviewing and improving our current approach to competitor analysis, with the goal of better aligning it with stakeholder expectations. You'll have the opportunity to collaborate with experienced colleagues across multiple parts of the organization such as R&D, innovation teams, sales and marketing etc, gaining valuable insights and mentorship throughout your project.

Background

In the fast-evolving health and medical products industry, staying ahead requires more than just scientific expertise- it demands strategic product insight. For us as an R&D, competitor analysis is a vital input that helps guide innovation and ensure superiority in a competitive market. Understanding what competitors offer helps us identify unmet needs and opportunities for differentiation. Your thesis will help us refine how we interpret and translate competitor data to product insights made assessable for relevant stakeholders.

Project

Main research question:

How can we, as R&D laboratory and analytics, improve the planning, execution, and presentation of competitor analysis to better support decision making in tenders and innovations?

You will investigate and propose improvements to our current competitor analysis way of working. This includes:

• Collect stakeholder input and expectations, through qualitative interviews
• Review existing systems and tools used
• Identify GAP's in how competitor data is collected, interpreted and communicated/visualized vs expectations
• Exploring best practices and benchmarking approaches from other industries/companies as well as internal organizations outside of R&D
• Developing new way of working and presentation of competitor insights which could incl dashboards or other reporting formats, use of AI or machine learning for competitor trend detection etc
• Evaluating if new way of working aligns with stakeholder needs and better supports product development

Your profile

• 1-2 students
• We welcome diverse academic backgrounds-including business administration, industrial engineering, data analytics or data visualization
• Ability to interpret data and draw insights/conclusions
• Interest in understanding stakeholder perspectives, competitive analysis and business development with the ability to assess both business perspectives and technical opportunities and limitations
• Experience from working with Power BI or similar tools for data visualization
• Meriting experience; experience with qualitative research methods incl interviews, surveys and desk research

This master thesis project will require close collaboration with our team and regular presence at our office in Gothenburg. Therefore, we are looking for students currently studying in Sweden who are either based in the Gothenburg area or are able to arrange accommodation locally for the duration of the project.

What you will be a part of

You will join a team committed to innovation and product superiority We value a proactive, curious mindset with a collaborative attitude- able to work across functional teams.

Your work will help us shape how we use competitor insights to drive business value

Application

Interested? If you are up for the challenge and think this sounds like you, apply online today Kindly note that due to GDPR we will not accept applications via mail.

If you apply as a pair of students, send in one application each but make sure to clearly state in the application which person you intend to do the master thesis with.

Application End Date:

04 nov. 2025

Job Requisition ID:

Essity257479