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.