Finnish winter road management - the evolving business ecosystem: BECSI WP2 project report

This case study describes the contents and results of BECSI project's work package 2. BECSI - Business Ecosystems and Platforms for innovations - is an innovation management research project carried jointly out by the University of Oulu, Technological University of Lappeenranta and VTT Technological Research Centre Ltd. This case study looks into one particular business ecosystem related to winter road management. The ecosystem comprises manufacturers of sensors, meteorological devices, winter maintenance equipment and meteorological information service providers. By definition, the public sector client, Finnish Transport Agency, is part of the ecosystem. The ecosystem has supplementary skills and know how on winter road management. This study investigated how the ecosystem's full potential could be utilised as an example of innovation boosting. The bottlenecks and obstacles stated by the companies as well as by the transport agency clearly show that there is plenty of potential to be realised in the future. Main challenges that are faced are rigid procurement traditions, lack of earnest collaboration and leadership, and finding the right persons to work together. Also uncertainty on the quantified the benefits of novel practices and innovative approaches was mentioned. A list of recommendations how to tackle the obstacles and bottlenecks for new innovations includes several items, e.g. innovative procurement methods, longterm committed collaboration, institutional goal-setting that supports wider shared benefits, and piloting on a larger scale. Basically the same recommendations can be considered for more general innovation strategies.