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Kiertotalous on toimintatapa, jolla tähdätään kestävän kehityksen mukaiseen kasvuun. Materiaalikierrot ovat kiertotalouden keskiössä, sillä niihin liittyy merkittäviä ympäristövaikutuksia ja toisaalta merkittävää liiketoimintaa eri sektoreilla. Vuonna 2018 materiaalikierroissa toimi yli 500 yritystä, ja kiertotaloudesta liikevaihtoa arvioidaan muodostuneen noin 11 mrd € (5 % bkt:sta). Kiertotalouden yritykset perustavat liiketoimintansa pääosin kierrätyksen tai resurssitehokkuuden liiketoimintamalleille. Vain muutama prosentti kiertotalouden liikevaihdosta kertyi tuote palveluna-konsepteista tai jakamisalusta-liiketoiminnasta. Materiaalikiertotalouden ekosysteemit voidaan jakaa kolmeen tyyppiekosysteemiin: alueellisista vahvuuksista ponnistavat ekosysteemit, teollisuuden vahvojen vetureiden ekosysteemit, sekä kiertotalousvisioon nojaavat ekosysteemit. Eri tyyppisillä ekosysteemeillä on oma tärkeä roolinsa kiertotalouden toteutuksessa. Kiertotalouden materiaalikiertoihin liittyvä liiketoiminta on arvion mukaan kaksinkertaistettavissa vuoteen 2030 mennessä. Kasvu vaatii kuitenkin samaan suuntaan ohjaavia yhtäaikaisia politiikkatoimia, kuten sääntely, investointituet ja T&K&I kannusteet. Seuraavaksi tulisi arvioida valittujen kiertotaloustoimien yhteinen vaikuttavuus eri toimialoilla suhteessa hiilineutraalisuustavoitteisiin ja kiertotalouden toteutumiseen.

Purpose: This paper offers a literature review and explores a business model innovation for platform business. It also suggests a practical tool, Platform Canvas, to support implementation activities. Design/Methodology/Approach: A literature review was conducted in fall 2016 that resulted in the tentative canvas approach, which was evaluated in seven real company cases. Findings: The study identified the eight most important characteristics of a platform business model innovation. To support the innovation and development of successful business models in a platform ecosystem, the Platform Canvas tool was created. With guiding questions, Platform Canvas allows for an ecosystemic approach to business model innovation: it helps to understand the value creation and capture for multiple actors. Originality/Value: The unique result is a practical tool, Platform Canvas, which facilitates business model creation in platform ecosystems. publishedVersion

As platforms are seen as the novel winning business logic, it is considered that they require new sets of competences from organizations as well as individuals. In this paper, the platform competences based on platform literature are presented with four elements-data, digitalization, service and ecosystems. These are explored in the context of 16 digi-driven startups, with their representatives assessing their own competences and stating the future roadmap for improving these. The findings validate that all of the four elements are both needed at the start-ups. They had a positive outlook on their competences: the highest score was given for digitalization, while data got the lowest score, though the differences were not strong. The start-ups were planning to address the competence growing with learning, with partnerships and with hiring.

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IPLATE (Integrating platform competences toward network effects) is a research project prompted by the success and disruption by digital platforms, platform companies and platform‐based business models. The project approaches platforms as an interactive, collaborative marketplace: integrating technical competences with creating business from understanding the value creation possibilities within the platform. The project addresses the need to strengthen competences of Finnish companies while also supporting Finnish policy makers in understanding the possibilities of instruments at their disposal for facilitating life in platform economy. The project is a joint research project financed by VTT, TUT, ETLA and Tekes. In addition to international research collaboration with Georgia Tech and University of Surrey, it partners with Nokia, Oracle, Agendium, Finnvera and Fira. IPLATE organized a morning seminar with the theme of ”Platform Economy: Interactions and Boundary Resources” on Sept 22, 2017. The event was attended by over 60 people, who came from industry, academic and public sector. This report is a result of the presentations and interactions that took place then. We want to thank the audience for participation, and Tekes for its generous support toward our project as well as the event!

Tämä artikkeli on osa laajempaa ”Platform competences toward network effects” -tutkimushanketta (lyhenne: iPlate). Haluamme esittääerityiset kiitokset erinomaisesta yhteistyöstä Innovaatiorahoituskeskus Tekesille sekä tutkimusprojektimme johtoryhmälle.

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to deepen our understanding of digital disruption in media ecosystems and explore how media ecosystem actors can innovate their boundary-spanning business models. Design/methodology/approach - We propose a qualitative case study approach in order to understand the studied phenomenon, digital disruption in Finnish media ecosystems, from the inside rather than the outside. Originality/value - This case study methodology demonstrates that the traditional media ecosystem is changing dramatically. Digitalisation is disrupting the current business models in media ecosystem and new actors and roles are emerging. We present with a value map that business model innovations in media ecosystems include possibilities in all three key areas, i.e. value creation, proposition and capture. Practical implications - The outcomes of the study highlight that most of the business model innovations require interaction with key players, as the roles and offerings of ecosystem actors are interconnected. Thus, media ecosystem actors should build the transformation to their own strengths, such as qualitative content production and brand name.

Crowdsourcing is increasingly used to tap into the innovative potential of a crowd. Oftentimes, this co-creation is conducted using virtual spaces, with an approach of a contest. In this study, the emphasis is on understanding how to integrate crowdsourcing contests into universities and their students, in order for them to provide value for all of the participants. Furthermore, the specific platform that is presented has been successfully used for design and packaging contests, with the goal of extending it now to engineering challenges. With background information from crowdsourcing contests in general and with lessons learned from existing platforms, this paper presents findings and discussions about a web-based survey addressing how to move beyond design challenges for achieving better university-industry collaboration using crowdsourcing.

This paper aims to increase understanding on the start-up innovation process from the perspective of entrepreneurial growth ambitions. Our study in the context of Finnish start-up ecosystem provides findings on how start-ups differ in terms of the ambition level, and provides suggestions on what this means from the perspective of supporting the start-up innovation process. Based on the findings we suggest that growth-ambitions should be seen as a more complex socially constructed concept that just an easily observable value defining the level of ambition. Growth-ambitions are influenced at least by the type of the market where start-up is focusing on, the scalability of the business model, personal characteristics of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial and international experience of the founders and their perceptions of the barriers and constraints of the field, and finally the social context to which they are embedded in. We claim that different types of start-up companies have different needs and therefore the support provided to those start-ups should be different.

Technology startups are expected to be a major driving force of economic growth in Europe. The search for new high-growth startups has been particularly topical in Finland, the country that is known for its high-tech products – and the fall of Nokia’s mobile phone business. Although a record number of startups has been established in recent years, the previously identified challenge is that only a small percentage of entrepreneurial businesses are responsible for the lion’s share of economic benefits typically associated with entrepreneurial activity. Hence, we need better understanding of what level of growth technology entrepreneurs aim to create and why there may be differences in growth ambitions among them. In this study, we undertook interpretivist case study research in pursuit of rich, empirically grounded understanding of entrepreneurial growth ambitions in the context of Finnish technology startups. We interviewed entrepreneurs at a Finnish startup event and supplemented this information with data available publicly on the Internet related to the growth ambitions of startups. Our study sought to increase understanding of the different aspects of entrepreneurial growth ambitions, and to explore the relationship between context and growth. Based on the findings, we suggest that growth ambitions should be seen as a complex, socially constructed concept. The growth ambitions of entrepreneurs in our study were influenced, at least in part, by their startups' institutional and market contexts, the scalability of their business models, their personal characteristics and experience, and their perceptions of the barriers and constraints of the field. We conclude that startups have very different growth pathways: although the growth of one startup may depend on the talent of a few software developers, the growth of another startup may be based on its success in building international sales networks. As a result, to get most out of the support provided for a startup ecosystem, support activities should be tailored to different types of high-growth startups.

Although start-ups are expected to be critical driving force for the European economy, many challenges during the start-up innovation process hinder the introduction and diffusion of these entrepreneurial innovations. This paper describes a case study the aims to explain concerns that start-up entrepreneurs experience during the start-up innovation process. Study is based on the interviews of 34 entrepreneurs who aim to introduce technology-based innovation to the markets and scale their business internationally. Our findings show that challenges and needs of the start-ups differ in the different phases of the start-up innovation process. For example, entrepreneurs experience the lack of business and strategic competence an issue in the early phase of the development, which however is not expressed to be a concern when new venture starts scaling its business to global markets. Nevertheless, findings highlight that fundraising is major concern for entrepreneurs regardless of the phase of innovation process.

The expectations of technology start-ups to boost the European economy growth have never been higher. Enterprise centers, knowledge parks, innovation centers, technopoles, seedbeds, and other versatile business incubator services are being built up with high hopes to repeat the success of well-known start-ups like Google or Twitter. At the same time technology start-ups are suffering high failure rate among all industries when trying to launch innovations to the market. This paper aims to shed light on this dilemma by describing a study of Finnish business incubator and acceleration services and their utilization among 28 Finnish technology start-ups. The findings imply a mismatch between the available services and the needs of entrepreneurs. Finding services successfully among manifold and geographically distributed public and private service providers is one of the challenging tasks entrepreneurs have.

Crowdsourcing has steadily proliferated across many disciplines and into new contexts as new industries embrace to model to rejigger old and inefficient operations and to invent entirely new uses, new solutions, products and service. Both researchers and practitioners are making increasing efforts to understand how to harness consumer's valuable knowledge in the innovation process. Accordingly, in this paper, crowdsourcing is explored in the innovation context, namely in the context of creative crowdsourcing, or peer-vetted creative production, in the case of a global consumer goods company looking for new products to its Latin American markets. This paper analyses the initiative, highlighting how external knowledge generation can be combined to internal knowledge generation in search of innovation. The case included knowledge generation of more than 850 individuals, resulting to 11 new products moving along the company's new process development process.

In this paper, we start from relational capital, which is one of the components of intellectual capital addressing the intangible values of organizations. In popular usage, the concept seems to be closely related to social capital, with similar words (such as relationships and network) explaining it, and with claims that scholars use social capital instead of relational capital despite their differing origins. As we observe these terms to be used interchangeably in business management literature, we will elaborate on the question: should relational capital and social capital be seen as one or two fields of study? We proceed to use bibliographic data from Scopus with the method of social network analysis in finding and comparing the authorities for relational capital and social capital. We define authority with Kleinberg's HITS algorithm, hence linking authority to citations (the number of citations as well as who does the citation), as citations are generally seen to indicate recognition and merit in the world of scientific writing. We then compare the resulting lists of top 20 authorities in the two fields as well as provide insights with network visualizations. Our findings reveal only 4 names on both lists (Hitt, Nahapiet, Ghoshal and Kogut), suggesting that the fields are separate but related, which is made explicit with the network visualizations that show these citation-based linkages between the two fields. The visualized networks suggest further that relational capital literature is using social capital literature in its citations. Overall, these findings reveal the linkages between the concepts of relational capital and social capital in scientific literature as well as provide means for showing the roles of specific actors, in this case certain core authors. Hence, the findings provide a shared understanding for scholars and practitioners interested in these concepts and can provide support for future studies in these areas.

In this paper, we explore a vital part of the Finnish innovation ecosystem: young, innovative companies that are supported for fast international growth. Highlighting the importance of networks, we proceed to analyze the perceived existing relationships these companies have with other companies, financing organizations as well as with individuals taking part in their co-creation. We propose that these existing relationships, or connections, may be used to explain the firm as a resource integrator within a network, contributing to its growth and success. Overall, we propose that network analysis and resulting network visualizations can provide novel insights into the understanding of possibilities for global growth and success.

Our goal is to develop and validate indicators for measuring the process and impact of user-driven service innovation. We concentrate on using the increasingly vast, diverse, open and available data that are created and shared by individuals in social media. The new analytical tools, such as social network analysis, and the powerful visualizations give us opportunities to see innovation, its entities, relationships and forces in a new way. These new insights can be used to create new services and improve innovation activities, as well as for policy development. The Sindi (Social media supported indicators for monitoring and evaluating user driven innovation) project is a collaboration project between VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, TUT Hypermedia Lab and Stanford's Media X, Innovation Ecosystems Network Initiative.

In this article, we apply the concept of value co-creation to the analysis of linkages between organizations and their human and financial resources to observe the emergence of cooperative activities in a specific innovation system. Through visual network analysis of a federated and socially constructed dataset of organizations and their related actors, we show how co-creation occurs through financial linkages. We use the ecosystem concept as a metaphoric reference to value co-creation with a network-centric mindset. Business financing linkages reveal convergence and co-creation in the innovation ecosystem, and network analysis is used to visualize the relationships between firms. Through the lens of relationship-based synergy, we provide a snapshot of innovation funding, which highlights the collaboration of venture capital and government agencies in co-creating the emerging Finnish innovation ecosystem.