Life events as an approach for service ecosystem design: lessons learned from the Finnish public services
Abstract
Life event services have emerged worldwide as an approach for designing public services by addressing significant transitions in life and building an ecosystem around them. We study this approach as an opportunity to engage the ecosystem in a novel manner. Empirically, we investigated three digital public service cases in Finland that leverage the life events approach. Life transitions make gaps between systems visible to the large and complex network of value-creators. Life events is a unifying term for public administrations, cross-sector organisations, and communities involved as providers. Whilst this approach uncovers an underserved set of actors and situational motivations, it provides the service ecosystem with a shared purpose. Our analysis establishes four demands for designing service ecosystems around life transitions: semantic interoperability, ecosystem governance, segmentation model and purpose-driven approach.
Keywords
Life events; service ecosystems; service design; digital services
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3384/ecp203071
Citation
Caba, N.,and Turunen, T.(2023) Life events as an approach for service ecosystem design: lessons learned from the Finnish public services, in Carla Cipolla, Claudia Mont’Alvão, Larissa Farias, Manuela Quaresma (eds.), ServDes 2023: Entanglements & Flows Conference, Service Encounters and Meanings, 11-14th July 2023, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. https://doi.org/10.3384/ecp203071
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Life events as an approach for service ecosystem design: lessons learned from the Finnish public services
Life event services have emerged worldwide as an approach for designing public services by addressing significant transitions in life and building an ecosystem around them. We study this approach as an opportunity to engage the ecosystem in a novel manner. Empirically, we investigated three digital public service cases in Finland that leverage the life events approach. Life transitions make gaps between systems visible to the large and complex network of value-creators. Life events is a unifying term for public administrations, cross-sector organisations, and communities involved as providers. Whilst this approach uncovers an underserved set of actors and situational motivations, it provides the service ecosystem with a shared purpose. Our analysis establishes four demands for designing service ecosystems around life transitions: semantic interoperability, ecosystem governance, segmentation model and purpose-driven approach.