Institutional Logics at Play in a Mobility-as-a-Service Ecosystem

Abstract

The last decade has brought the transport sector to the forefront of discussions on sustainability and digital innovations: practitioners, researchers, and regulators alike have witnessed the emergence of a wide diversity of shared mobility services. Based on a longitudinal case study of a regional Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) ecosystem in Sweden, constituted of a document analysis and 24 semi-structured interviews with 18 representatives from regional authorities, mobility service providers, and other stakeholders from the public and private sectors, this study examines the co-existing and competing institutional logics at play, identified as State logic, Market logic, Sustainability logic, Experimental logic, and Service logic. The analysis reveals that these institutional logics pertain to tensions in the collaboration within the ecosystem’s stakeholders in terms of: (1) finding a common vision and scope for MaaS, (2) establishing a sustainable business model, (3) triggering a behavioral change regarding car travel, (4) being able to find one’s role within the project and to consequently collaborate with other stakeholders, and (5) managing uncertainty through testing and experimenting innovative solutions, which ultimately yielded key learnings about MaaS and the shared mobility ecosystem and its stakeholders. These case study findings, based on an institutional logics framework, provide a novel perspective on emerging ecosystems, from which implications for MaaS developers and further research on shared mobility are drawn.

Post-Covid Perspectives for the Automotive Industry, Opportunities, and Threats

“…Shared transport allows to reduce traffics, the number of needed parking spaces, and the number of cars on the road. Also, it can generate a reduction in total transportation costs (Guyader et al, 2021). The gamechanger was the development of society connection possibilities.…”

“…Last years and the constant growth of people with smartphones make the carsharing idea fall on fertile ground. Nowadays we can understand shared mobility as a set of connected services from the scope of carsharing, bike-sharing, carpooling, scooters pooling, taxi and ondemand services, shuttle services private transit services, and of course public transit services (Guyader et al, 2021). Currently service providers in mentioned mobility feature taking care of the optimization of performance efficiency.…”

Shared Mobility: Evolving Practices for Sustainability

“…Based on a longitudinal case study of a regional Mobility-as-a-Service, Guyader, Nansubuga, and Skill [37] follow the collaboration between governmental authorities, mobility service providers, and other stakeholders from the public and private sectors. Previous research highlighted many challenges in the development of MaaS, including issues of technological integration, but also issues of collaboration between the diverse stakeholders involved, and trade-offs between expectations for MaaS and the actual user experience.…”

“…), or shuttle services for example, neither submissions nor publications in this Special Issue specifically focused on them. Nevertheless, we can denote that several papers investigated the relationships between traditional public transportation services and carpooling [26] or on-demand ridehailing [28], or a combination of them all in a MaaS ecosystem [37]. Considering for example the recently proposed pathways to overcome the challenges of wide-scale deployment of micro-mobility for sustainability [38], we believe that empirical research on the integration (e.g., packaging, bundling) of different mobility services, including carsharing, public transportation, and micro-mobility, is urgently needed.…”