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Platform-enabled services targeted to make everyday life easier have become increasingly available in recent decades, which in some cases challenge traditional ways of owning and working. However, comprehensive data-driven value creation opportunities, which are seamlessly connected to various needs in the everyday life of citizens or residents, are still largely untapped and unstudied. This article investigates value creation opportunities for holistic housing concepts with related ecosystems designed to combine the physical environment of residents along with a digital platform. The novelty of this study builds on a holistic understanding of value co-creation in housing, enabled by digital platforms at the ecosystem level. The empirical study focuses on a qualitative multi-case study of four holistic and residentcentric service concepts, which all include digital platforms. The main findings are concluded as follows: First, digital platforms enable various value creation opportunities in resident-centric housing concepts and related ecosystems. Second, exploring strategic choices regarding competitiveness, innovation, and growth revealed that digital platforms played various roles such as informative, supportive, integrative, or even embedded in novel housing as a service platform concepts, which call for totally new orchestration and business models across traditional industrial and ecosystem boundaries. Third, in light of the basic mechanisms for ensuring competitiveness and growth in data and a platform economy, we identify two main alternative strategic approaches. The findings serve both practitioners and researchers exploring opportunities of a platform economy, with a particular benefit for those in largely unstudied housingmarkets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of urban living labs have been set up in recent years, with the aim of developing innovation processes within a multi-stakeholder partnership in an urban context. Several urban living labs focus on sustainable development, which is a visible and urgent issue in less valued suburbs in need of modernization and social uplift. We argue that, when applying the living labs approach in the context of sustainable development in suburbs, the primary focus should be society's collective goals, as expressed through municipalities and users. The aim of this article is to show examples of how urban living labs can be applied in less valued suburbs in order to contribute to sustainability based on societal goals. We build on analyses from the research project SubUrbanLab, where urban living labs were set up in Alby and Peltosaari, two suburban areas in Sweden and Finland, respectively. We draw lessons regarding how to use urban living labs for sustainable development in order to create favourable conditions for ongoing engagement with the municipality and users towards long-term sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to answer the following three questions: (1) What are the reference values of normalisation for Finnish production and Finnish consumption and how do they differ from the European reference values?, (2) How do these differences influence the interpretation of normalised LCIA results?, and (3) How can normalised LCIA results be made more comprehensible to non-LCA experts with the help of communication material? Methods: Finnish reference values for normalisation were calculated on the basis of the Finnish environmentally extended input-output model and ReCiPe LCIA method. The influence of different normalised results on the interpretation of LCIA was assessed based on an LCA study of print products. LCA communication material (product-specific fact sheets) was developed by organising workshops and interviews with stakeholders in the paper and printing industry. Results and discussion: A comparison of the production based Finnish reference values to the European reference values shows that Finland contributes roughly 1 % to the European values in all impact categories except in the fossil depletion category where the contribution is 3 %. The order of magnitude of the impact categories varies depending on the reference system used for normalisation, which influences the interpretation of LCIA results. The normalised results were made more comprehensible by developing fact sheets including background information and guidance for interpretation of the LCIA results. Conclusions: The interpreter of normalised LCIA results does not usually have the information to estimate how the chosen reference system influences the results. A sensitivity analysis with different reference values may help to highlight this effect. When communicating to non-LCA-practitioners, LCIA results need to be connected to a wider context, which can be achieved by using normalisation to give an idea of the order of magnitude of the results. However, the harmfulness of the impact categories in relation to each other cannot be judged on the basis of the normalised results, which seems to be a difficult concept for non-LCA-practitioners to understand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]