COLLECTIVE ACTION IN A SMART LIVING PLATFORM ECOSYSTEM: THE ROLE OF PLATFORM LEADERSHIP AND PLATFORM OPENNESS

The growing popularity of mobile and internet-based services is increasingly changing the vision of smart homes from simple home automation to advanced ICT services which are accessible everywhere. Many small and large vendors and service providers across different industries are becoming more aware of the remarkable prospects in the smart living domain. Accordingly, several services bundled with different service platforms are emerging in the market, aiming at providing elderly-care, energy management, security or entertainment services. The overwhelming number of service platforms (mostly with proprietary standards and technologies) has made this domain even more complex and doubtful for users. While collective action between actors for developing common service platforms may solve the complexity and foster adoption of these services, the challenges of cooperation hinder many actors from joint attempts. In this paper, we study how inter-organizational cooperation for developing a common service platform for smart living services emerges. Specifically, we study the influence of platform leadership and platform openness on collective action. We do so by conducting a single case study on a unique collaborative elderly-care platform development project in Finland. The case was critical as it had all the required conditions (i.e. collective action for a common platform development project in the smart living domain) to test our propositions. The results indicate the important role of a central actor or platform leader in promoting and coordinating collaboration, even in the absence of strong interdependency in the ecosystem. We also found that most of the parties are motivated to cooperate for an open industry standard platform instead of a proprietary standard platform to allow easy integration of other services and devices to the platform. However, only under certain rules, the parties open up the business ecosystem and cooperate with new companies

Workplace primary prevention programmes enabled by information and communication technology

As the workforce is ageing across the globe, employers are implementing primary prevention programmes to encourage their employees to live healthier lives. Information and communication technology (ICT) can support these programmes by collecting, storing and processing data, and by visualizing health progress. However, there is a lack of knowledge of how ICT is utilized in primary prevention programmes at workplaces and how its utilization affects social issues. This paper fills that gap by presenting an illustrative case of a primary prevention programme in Finland. We find that offering employees the opportunity to use ICT for data collection, storage and sharing, contributes to their acceptance of the programme. Moreover, our findings show that while visualizing the effects of the programme through ICT contributes to lifestyle change, such soft factors as the involvement of doctors are just as important.</span

A Collective Action Perspective on a Healthcare Service Platform Development Project

The population of elderly people and their need for wellbeing and healthcare services is rapidly growing. At the same time, the supply for these services is not increasing at the same pace due to increasing costs and shortage of trained personnel. Therefore, many organizations are developing modern wellbeing ICT-enabled devices to assist the elderly people to live at their homes independently as long as possible and enabling the care providers to work more effectively. However, isolated attempts have led to emergence of countless devices and services with proprietary service platforms which have made this domain more complex. While collective action between actors for developing common service platforms may solve the complexity and foster adoption of these services, the challenges of cooperation hinder many actors from joint attempts. In this paper, we study how and why inter-organizational cooperation emerges in the home-care domain. Specifically, we study the impact of heterogeneity of interests and resources on the likelihood of collective action among participants in the healthcare domain. We do so by conducting a single case study on a unique collaborative elderly- care platform development project in Finland. The case was critical as it had all the required conditions (i.e. collective action for a common platform development project in the healthcare domain) to test our propositions. The results present the importance of resource heterogeneity for the emergence of collective action, especially in a business ecosystem of small companies with limited capitals and technical resources. We also found that heterogeneity of interests is not really problematic when the project is in the development phase (R&D) and especially in the presence of selective incentives that motivate participation of companies

Main requirements of a Health and Wellbeing Platform: findings from four focus group discussions

Supporting the ageing population is a worldwide challenge as it causes a huge tension on societies, regarding to healthcare budgets, resources, pensions and social security systems. To support people ‘age in place’ we propose a digital matchmaking platform for health and wellbeing. Nevertheless, what should be the main purpose of such a platform is unclear. In this paper, we present the main requirements of a health and wellbeing platform based on four focus group discussions with 28 stakeholders and potential end-users. The findings show that the young elderly (55 - 75) can be considered as the main target group. Accordingly, we found that the most beneficial requirements are related to: contact with others, matchmaking for smart living products and services, and information about local activities. Our research adds design knowledge to digital platform literature and exposes the main requirements of a health and wellbeing platform, which are of value for practitioners in the field