Umeå University's logo

Increasingly connected vehicles offer drivers benefits related to safety, navigation, and maintenance. They also provide policymakers new opportunities to trace and modify behavior using data insights. For such efforts to be effective, policymakers need access to policy instruments. These instruments must also be adopted by regulated entities such as technology providers, vehicle manufacturers, and drivers. Reuse and scaling across jurisdictional boundaries are crucial for the efficient development, adoption, and use of these digital tools. However, establishing digital tools that scale across diverse contexts requires navigating trade-offs between generalization to meet global demands and specialization to provide desired functionality. Using digital trace data and interviews, we conducted a longitudinal study of the development of the Mobility Data Specification standard for, freefloating e-scooters, over three years. We identified four key instrument tensions related to privacy, scope, richness, and the pace of evolution. We detail the nature of these tensions, analyze how they were mitigated, and suggest implications for the development of digital regulatory tools that span jurisdictional boundaries.

Increasingly connected vehicles offer drivers benefits related to safety, navigation, and maintenance. They also provide policymakers new opportunities to trace and modify behavior using data insights. For such efforts to be effective, policymakers need access to policy instruments. These instruments must also be adopted by regulated entities such as technology providers, vehicle manufacturers, and drivers. Reuse and scaling across jurisdictional boundaries are crucial for the efficient development, adoption, and use of these digital tools. However, establishing digital tools that scale across diverse contexts requires navigating trade-offs between generalization to meet global demands and specialization to provide desired functionality. Using digital trace data and interviews, we conducted a longitudinal study of the development of the Mobility Data Specification standard for, free-floating e-scooters, over three years. We identified four key instrument tensions related to privacy, scope, richness, and the pace of evolution. We detail the nature of these tensions, analyze how they were mitigated, and suggest implications for the development of digital regulatory tools that span jurisdictional boundaries.

Multi-purpose ports' efficient and sustainable operation relies on seamless coordination and decision-making among multiple organizations. This paper underscores the critical importance of forecasting resource and infrastructure utilization for informed operational, tactical, and strategic decision-making. The proposed approach draws on digital twin technology to enable collaborative decision-making by modeling complex port environments to enable shared situational awareness among stakeholders. Illustrated through a collaborative project involving the RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, National University of Singapore, Grieg Connect, Umeå University, Kvarken Ports Umeå, and INAB, we propose a digital twin design to empower the port as a decision- maker in multi-organizational settings to proactively plan and optimize its utilization of present and future resources.

Maritime transports play a vital role for several industries in enabling efficient and sustainable transportation of goods. Ports are central hubs in the transport chain since they connect the maritime and land-based transport systems. The central position of ports makes them critical enablers of efficiency through digital connectivity but also implies that they need to consider many types of participating agents with whom they form episodic tight couplings. However, the industry's digitalization level remains relatively low, and we know little of the challenges facing ports in increasing it. Through a case study of digitalization in Swedish small- and medium-sized ports handling different types of cargo and serving different types of transport modes, we identify key objectives and critical challenges underlying digitalization processes in ports.

Connected vehicles generate new data streams that present promising opportunities for policymakers to monitor and learn from events and behavior. To explore what we can learn from how public entities leverage ubiquitous data streams for policy development and enforcement, we draw on a case study of the standard Mobility Data Specification (MDS) and its use by cities to regulate E-scooter operators. Our findings suggest that (1) the richness of real-time data changes the speed of policy revision, (2) data access enables moving some micro-decisions to the edge, and (3) policy will be formulated as fixed or flexible with different amendment rules.

Having secured venture capital for their startups, digital entrepreneurs face a critical transition to the postinvestment phase. They must evolve new organizational models and demonstrate their capacity to operate in the present while maintaining attention to the future. This transition unfolds in a hyperturbulent context in which rapid growth is crucial owing to competitive advantages from scale and scope. While the present-future tension has received extensive attention in other domains, we know little about how it manifests and affects digital startups transitioning into the postinvestment phase. In this article, we examine entrepreneurs’ challenges during this transition through an action research study of the interactions between a venture capital firm and a set of digital startups. We identify eight salient challenges conceptualized as transition traps, then define and validate tactics for increasing digital startups’ readiness to navigate them. We identify the main transition traps and provide actionable advice for increasing digital startups’ readiness to navigate them.

Digital ecosystem governance entails the management of complex, dynamic power relationships. As entrant platform providers seek to cultivate an ecosystem, they must carefully navigate these power relationships when dealing with governance tensions. Providers generally seek to leverage the ecosystem's generative potential by facilitating a variety of interactions and distributing design rights. Simultaneously, they need to ensure stability and order by imposing rules that resolve contentious matters and restrict system participants' degrees of freedom. This study explores how and why providers can induce ecosystem actors to engage in collaborative negotiation regarding such governance tensions through a case study of the introduction of an open data platform in the Swedish public transport sector. Our analysis offers three main contributions. First, it provides an empirical demonstration that entrepreneurial threats, as well as opportunities, can trigger platform launches and drive collaborative negotiation of digital ecosystem governance. Second, it extends conceptualizations of boundary resources beyond the current focus on transactional elements by demonstrating the role of interactive boundary resources in the negotiation of governance grounded in both social and systemic power relationships.Third, it shows how positive reinforcement can complement punitive measures to increase acceptance of design rules.

Construction site operations often involve multiple actors with substantial variations in assumptions, expectations, and knowledge about technology. This could impair digitalization, which involves development of socio-cognitive environments that foster use of digital technology in new organizational procedures. Nevertheless, construction industry digitalization research has mainly addressed firm-level transformation of engineering phases and focused on technology, largely ignoring challenges arising from cognitive differences among actors at construction sites. Thus, we report a case study of attempts to spark construction site digitalization through a shared information management system (IMS). Applying technology frame of reference theory, we demonstrate how differences within groups among actors’ frames (inconsistency) shape group-level frame misalignment (incongruence) and thus digitalization outcomes. The IMS was implemented successfully at the focal firm’s headquarter and regional office levels. However, substantial construction site-level frame inconsistency led to misaligned group-level expectations and generated a fragmented socio-cognitive environment that hindered strategic digitalization. In conclusion, socio-cognitive environments at industry, construction site, and group levels recursively shape individual frames, and harmonization of frames is important to realize construction digitalization.