The Finnish road weather business ecosystem: structure, potentials and implications for demand-driven innovation policy

Abstract

This study analyses the Finnish road weather and maintenance business ecosystem and its development potential. The ecosystem proposes value by combining complementary expertise through which the participating companies can achieve competitive advantages. In order to facilitate value co-creation, public authorities must support and stimulate these ecosystems. The bottlenecks and obstacles identified by the companies and public authorities in value creation clearly indicate that there is significant potential to be realised in the future. In sum, the main challenges are related to rigid procurement models, lack of collaboration, and finding the right people and organisations to work together. In the end, a list of recommendations on how to tackle the constraints for new innovations is presented, e.g., innovative procurement methods, long-term committed collaboration, mutually set objectives supporting shared benefits and risks, and agile piloting on a larger scale. Basically, the same recommendations can be considered for more general innovation strategies.