Juri Mattila

How Do Intelligent Goods Shape Closed-Loop Systems?

Disruptive technologies can increase the intelligence of goods and revitalize business models in the circular economy. Applying an industrial ecology perspective, this article discusses how intelligent goods can boost the sustainability of industrial ecosystems. North American and European cases highlight how business model innovators can utilize goods-related information to develop more competitive closed-loop systems. The authors identify three archetypes of closed-loop systems—inner circles, decentralized systems, and open systems—and delineate how they leverage information resources for collaboration. This study advances the understanding of closed-loop systems in the circular economy, which is more dependent than ever on digital platforms.

Expanding the Platform: Smart Contracts as Boundary Resources

Platform businesses are born global, with instant access to global markets. Thanks to the algorithmic, self-executing and self-enforcing computer programmes known as smart contracts, platform businesses now also have instant access to global capital markets from birth. However, the legal status of these smart-contract-enabled funding mechanisms and smart contracts in general is not well defined. In this article, we analyse how well the formation mechanisms of the general principles of Finnish contract law can be applied to the technological framework of smart contracts. We find that depending on the case, smart contracts can create legally binding rights and obligations to their parties. We also observe that contracts have not been formerly perceived as technical boundary resources in the sense that platform ecosystems could foster broader network effects by opening their application contracting interfaces to third parties.

Distributed Governance in Multi-Sided Platforms

Over the last decade, blockchain technology has facilitated a method by which a network of equipotent and equally privileged peers can jointly maintain and edit databases in an entirely decentralized manner, without any kind of an intermediary exhibiting unilateral control. As a consequence it has enabled the creation of a new type of multi-sided platform architecture with distributed governance. As the different platform provision functions are opened to free market competition rather than monopolized by a single entity, the monopoly-like pricing structure typical of platforms is overhauled. Instead, blockchain-enabled distributed platforms appear to share value more evenly between the all the different market sides connected to the platform. Our analysis reveals that blockchain technology adds new considerations to how multi-sided platform architectures should be perceived and analyzed.

Demand and Regulation for e-Commerce in Goods

As paper communication volumes decline, postal operators (POs) are developing parcel delivery-based growth in e-commerce to compensate for revenue lost due to lower letter demand. Optimistic forecasts suggest that e-commerce will grow at an exponential rate. Such projections, however, often overlook the fact that goods only account for 40 % of the total value of e-commerce (Statistics Finland 2014a). Furthermore, the high growth figures for e-commerce are also attributable to higher value purchases than to higher quantity of purchases. Since 2000, the volume of B2C e-commerce in goods has grown by 30 % in Finland, while the monetary value has tripled. There is also a growing trend of online shopping that involves the consumer picking up the goods themselves from a physical store. It would appear that the revenue accrued from these services will only compensate for a small proportion of the revenue lost as a result of the decline in paper communication.