1) Background

Offering Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is about integrating different mobility services from a diversity of public and private actors, into one platform system embodied in a smartphone app to provide unique mobility solutions to each customer need. The objectives of MaaS are to provide more convenient sustainable mobility solutions than the use of private cars, and to reduce traffic congestion and CO2 emissions, liberate parking areas, and other major issues in city centers. In the “sharing economy paradigm”, commuters will not necessarily possess their own means of transportation. With the assumption that a high level of integration between mobility services is more appealing to customers and a tool for promoting sustainability, than the possession and usage of private cars, MaaS is anchored in this paradigm promoting access instead of ownership.

MaaS can be traced back to a pilot project developed and implemented in Gothenburg, Sweden during 2013-2014, known as Go:Smart. Go:Smart aimed to develop, test (for a limited time period), and evaluate ways to offer smarter and more sustainable ways of traveling for city residents. At the end of the project, 93% of the pilot participants found MaaS app very useful and were willing to continue using it. Despite this, Go:Smart was discontinued. To succeed at the “transportation smörgåsbord concept” future projects would require a careful cooperation and collaboration between the key actors (i.e. the diverse providers of transportation services) involved in the project. In short, while the pilot app worked for 200 people, the actors behind the MaaS solution did not manage to maintain the collaboration and to establish a sustainable business model. Integration barriers, issues of public-private partnership, lack of scalability, developing trust for collaboration, are among the main challenges in implementing MaaS. The public-private partnership impedes the conversion from successful MaaS pilots to full public launch, so that more research should be conducted to better understand the obstacles of MaaS development within public-private collaborations.

For the MaaS sector to grow as expected, we need to better understand how the mobility actors involved collaborate to launch a MaaS app that meets customers demand, attracts new customers, and maintains a sufficient user base on the long term. This paper aims to investigate the different logics performed by actors involved in creating a market for MaaS that fulfils and shapes customer demand for mobility. On the one hand, a certain mobility demand already exists among customers (e.g. commuters who use different transportation modes), which the MaaS offer can provide a solution through a combination of mobility services that removes inconvenient hassles (e.g. combining multiple subscriptions, timetables, and itineraries from different providers). On the other hand, the demand for mobility can be constructed to attract new customers (e.g. early adopters of new technologies, people with an access-over-ownership lifestyle) with a convenient, innovative, and seamless solution to organize commuting and daily travels such as they find MaaS superior to private car travels and remain actual users. To grasp the different logics underlying these aspects of fulfilling and shaping the demand on a new market, the MaaS actors’ collaboration is analyzed through the lens of institutional logics.

The marketing literature has recognized that markets are emerging in an on-going process guided by actors so that the markets are shaped favorably to them. This market creation is influenced by other market-shaping processes from adjacent markets and certain market actors can even force the creation of a market. Furthermore, markets are not immediately populated by a wide variety of market actors, but through an incremental process of different activities, sometimes aimed at changing the rules of a market. Considering the introduction of MaaS in an existing ecosystem of actors with their own mobility services as a case of new market creation and shaping activities and mechanisms guided by the same actors opens up opportunities to investigate the processes aimed at claiming, demarcating or controlling a market. 

(2) Method and material

This paper is based a case study of LinMaaS, an ongoing project initiated by the municipality of Linköping to launch its own MaaS within the next two years. We investigate in what ways demand for MaaS with seamless, flexible, and multi-modal mobility precedes the introduction of the mobility solution and this demand is created and shaped by the actors behind LinMasS development. We gather empirical data from interviews with managers and decisions makers from different LinMaaS public and private stakeholders (e.g., the municipality, the public transportation company offering bus and train services, the carsharing company, the software company, the e-scooter company), and notes and meeting minutes across different Work Package groups (e.g., app design, pricing models, marketing communications). As members of the research team evaluating the pilot project of LinMaaS, we have been able to get in-depth insights.

(3) Analysis and results

Different institutional logics can coexist in everyday practice, but they can also get into conflict. Institutional logics are particularly relevant for studying initiatives where actors from private and public sectors collaborate to create new digital solutions while managing the tensions between different assumptions, norms, ambitions, regulations, and organizational practices, which investigating intersecting logics allow to highlight. The sharing economy discourse and practices are also permeated with tensions (i.e. similar to institutional logics) between the communal norms of pro-social sharing and the commercial norms of market-based transactions. The results of this case study of LinMaaS and how the demand for mobility is identified and shaped in a new market show how different logics coexist and conflict simultaneously in unresolved tensions between a great diversity of actors. Identifying these different logics and their implications is key to a better management of the collaboration to create a sustainable ecosystem for MaaS.